An unexpected wildlife portrait emerges as global phenomenon, proving that extraordinary moments hide in plain sight

When most people imagine award-winning wildlife photography, they picture sunlit savannas, cascading waterfalls, or pristine jungle canopies. They imagine photographers trekking through remote wilderness, cameras in hand, seeking nature in its most dramatic and dangerous forms. What they don’t imagine is a photographer lying flat on his belly on the grimy floor of a subway station at midnight.
Yet that’s exactly the scene that would lead to one of the most celebrated wildlife photographs of 2020.
The Unexpected Subject
Bristol-based photographer Sam Rowley didn’t set out to revolutionize wildlife photography. The project that would change his career began with a simple suggestion from a friend who shared a video of mice scurrying on a London Underground platform. What others might have dismissed as an unremarkable moment caught Rowley’s imagination in an entirely different way.
“Most people never look down,” he would later explain. “They’re in a hurry, thinking about their day, their destination. But down there, an entire world exists that we’ve never bothered to see.”
This wasn’t a question of finding exotic animals in distant lands. This was about revealing the hidden stories in the spaces we pass through every single day. Rowley became obsessed with documenting the lives of the rodents inhabiting London’s Underground tunnels—creatures that share our cities but remain invisible to almost everyone who encounters them.
The Week That Changed Everything
In 2019, Rowley invested an entire week documenting his underground subjects. This wasn’t glamorous wildlife photography. Armed with cameras and patience, he spent night after night lying on the dirty platforms of central London stations, often enduring strange looks from late-night passengers and revelers heading home from nights out.
The physical discomfort was only the beginning. After lying on the platform one evening, he suddenly felt a drunk commuter collapse on top of him. “It was quite the moment,” he would later recount with dark humor to NPR. But moments like these only reinforced his commitment to the project.
From his ground-level perspective, Rowley observed the mice behaving much like other urban creatures—fighting over the scraps of food dropped by commuters throughout the day. The competition for resources was fierce, and occasionally, two mice would clash simultaneously over the same crumb of food.
The Perfect Moment
Most battles lasted mere seconds. One mouse would grab the prize and flee back into the darkness of the tunnels, while the other would scurry away in a different direction. Rowley knew he needed split-second timing to capture the exact moment when two mice faced off, their tiny bodies frozen in what resembled a miniature boxing match.
Then, finally, it happened.
Two mice jumped at the same scrap simultaneously, their faces confronting each other in a pose that looked remarkably like boxers squaring up in the ring. For one heartbeat—literally just a fraction of a second—the entire battle played out in perfect composition and dramatic tension. Rowley’s finger found the shutter button, and that instant became immortalized.
He titled the image “Station Squabble.”
Recognition and Viral Victory
When the 2019 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition opened, Rowley submitted his unconventional image among more than 48,000 other entries. The Natural History Museum in London, which produces the prestigious annual competition, selected 25 finalists from the vast pool of submissions.
What happened next was remarkable. When the public was invited to vote for the LUMIX People’s Choice Award—named after the camera company sponsoring the award—photography enthusiasts from around the world cast their ballots. In February 2020, the results were announced: Sam Rowley’s image of two mice fighting in the London Underground had claimed the top honor.
28,000 people had voted, and his photograph of urban wildlife had prevailed over centuries of traditional wildlife photography submissions.
A Message About Our World
The victory sparked conversations that extended far beyond photography circles. Sir Michael Dixon, Director of the Natural History Museum, offered profound perspective on what made Rowley’s image so significant:
“Sam’s image provides a fascinating glimpse into how wildlife functions in a human-dominated environment. The mice’s behaviour is sculpted by our daily routine, the transport we use and the food we discard. This image reminds us that while we may wander past it every day, humans are inherently intertwined with the nature that is on our doorstep.”
Rowley himself reflected on the deeper meaning of his work in interviews following his victory. At just 25 years old and working as a researcher for the BBC, he understood that traditional wildlife photography was losing its power to move modern audiences. Everyone had seen lions on the plains. Everyone had marveled at gorillas in mist-covered mountains.
But how many people had truly noticed the wildlife in their own cities? How many had considered the struggle for survival happening beneath their feet on the Underground platform?
“With the majority of the world living in urban areas and cities now, you have to tell the story about how people relate to wildlife,” Rowley explained. “Wildlife is fantastic and I think we need to appreciate the smaller and supposedly more difficult animals to live with.”
The mice of London’s Underground had their own story to tell—a story of adaptation, desperation, and survival in an environment shaped entirely by human activity. Rowley’s camera had simply given them a voice.

The Reactions
People’s responses to the image were overwhelmingly positive but also marked by discovery. Many Londoners who rode the Underground daily were astounded. “I never knew that they were so cheeky and so silly down on the tube,” people told Rowley in interviews.
The photograph became a sensation on social media. Artists created remixes, adding everything from lightsabers to comparisons with Tom and Jerry cartoons. The image had somehow managed to be simultaneously serious—a statement about human-animal coexistence—and delightfully entertaining.
A New Perspective on Wildlife
Rowley’s triumph represented a subtle but significant shift in how we think about nature photography. It suggested that we don’t need to travel to the ends of the earth to find compelling wildlife stories. We don’t need to penetrate unexplored jungles or traverse dangerous terrain.
Sometimes, the most remarkable wildlife moments happen in the last place we’d think to look—on the underground platform we’ve used a hundred times, in the gap between the tracks we’ve never noticed, in the struggle between two creatures we’ve never actually seen.
All it takes is the willingness to lie down on a dirty floor and wait long enough to notice the world happening beneath our feet.
Exhibition Legacy
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum ran until May 31, 2020, featuring “Station Squabble” prominently among the selected images. For visitors to the museum, Rowley’s photograph became a gateway to reimagining their relationship with urban nature.
Sam Rowley had succeeded in his original mission: to make people look down.