Stephen Rutt

‘’You could walk into a wood on a summer’s day, pretty and green, and not know a thing was wrong if you didn’t know the signs to look for. And nowhere is that gap between appearance and reality more apparent than with climate change - the great invisible force holding the world to ransom.’’

Stephen Rutt takes us on a journey in the heart of the peculiar, absurd summer of 2020, in a world that seems to have lost its footing. Sonnet 18 and Orwell’s thoughts welcome us and then we’re in for the unique experience of witnessing the changes of the British summer in a time when we are still unable to travel to the UK (even though we are fully vaccinated but whatever…). A time when Nature rings every alarm possible. You will find no better guide than Stephen Rutt.

‘’Light is like time. It is always changing but the pace is too slow to notice until suddenly, one evening it is light when you leave work, or one morning, you wake up with day leaking in at the curtain’s edge. It is there, unlike yesterday. And you realise with a jolt of surprise- is that the time of the year?’’

Even though I live in the centre of Athens, my neighbourhood still retains old houses and trees and small parks. I work in the northern suburbs of the capital where Nature is very much present, thank God, and the changing of the seasons is there in all its glory every year. But working from home for a year and a half (with small intervals) deprived me of those moments when the cherry trees start blossoming and the afternoons become longer, sweeter. Summer came rather late in Greece this year which makes Stephen’s observations even more relatable. Easter week was rainy, May was almost cold and the first days of June were chilly. We’re currently going through a massive heatwave (41 in certain parts of the country) while news of the tornado in Moravia has shocked us all. Learning about the changing of the seasons, from their early ‘’establishment’’ to the way we perceive them now and the research on phenology have never felt more urgent. And the virus is no excuse for ignorance or indifference.

‘’We must not lose sight of the present while worrying about the future.’’

Let us wander in the heart of Cornwall on a day when the land became white due to a wondrous snowstorm. Let us find a path in a forest in Bedfordshire and travel (virtually as most of us have done these past months) to the Wood of Cree in Scotland. Let us visit marshes, the moors of Galloway, lochs and castles, echoing Robert Burns’ poetry and laments.

Let us watch for dragonflies and nightjars, for owls (always special to me being an Athenian and all…), let us listen for corn buntings and skylarks, for cuckoos and rooks. See? A small pearl-bordered fritillary, a Scotch argus, a bat released into the wild, healed by loving people. Every gift of Nature is here. And what do we do?

The summer solstice has already passed. We sit on our porches and balconies, enjoying the peaceful summer nights - heatwave or no heatwave- the cares of winter places in a tiny, locked box somewhere in our minds. And we think that all is well. But it only takes a birding scope (in a beautiful story narrated by Stephen) to understand how tiny we are and what great problems we are constantly creating for Mother Earth.

This book is a superbly beautiful ode to the soul of the woodland in summer and a mighty alert to finally reconsider and do our duty.

*I LOVED the references to Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, one of my favourite paintings, and John Buchan’s The Thirty- Nine Steps. *

‘’Everything is now a warning: things out of order or things passing as normal that betray how far from normal we have strayed. Perhaps the eternal summer of Shakespeare’s compliment has become the curse of our future.’’

Many thanks to Stephen Rutt, Alison Menzies and Elliott & Thompson for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/… (mehr)

‘’I feel eager for autumn. The birds punctuate my year: time passes constantly but birds are the grammar of its passing, they give a rough working order to the months. I have my totems: the first singing chiffchaff at the beginning of spring and the first screeching swift at its end. The silencing of song at the end of summer; the disappearance of the swifts and the arrivals of autumn. The extra thrushes: the redwings gently whistling through the autumn night and the fieldfares clattering along fruit-laden hedgerows.’’

Stephen Rutt creates a book that brings the breath of winter, the calmness of the freezing season, the very perfume of the icy trees and the Scottish nature in your living room. His love for the geese becomes an inspiration to overcome hardships and the insecurity of moving to a new place, and the changing of the seasons through the course of the various species of goose reflects the deep bond between Nature, her creatures and the human being through absolute respect, understanding and love.

Rutt paints with words. He writes about the significance of goose in Europe and China, through the history of our world’s cultural heritage since geese provided the quill pens used to ‘’create’’ the immortal works of Shakespeare. He refers to the legend of Juno’s sacred geese and the invasion of the Gauls, taken from the records of Livy and I was delighted to see a reference to Penelope’s dream of the princes as geese from Homer’s The Odyssey.

This book is a natural treasure read in one sitting and cherished forever.

‘’October by calendar; deep into winter by spirit. I can only faintly see the first line of hills. The trees reduced to pale grey shadows, their shapes indistinct in the weather: I see a flock of geese again, swirling like static around the television aerials, descending down to the fields behind the houses.’’

‘’November bleeds greyness into December. December’s dampness begins to freeze. Fog spends several days cloaking the street, shrouding the graveyard over the road. I walk through it - an impromptu Gothic wonderland - and down to the footbridge over the river, visibility so low that I can’t see either bend and it feels as if I am trapped in a cloche, my own bubble of the world, everything else dulled, hidden or gone. At night along the road, it is possible to see only the streetlamps and the way the freezing fog curves out from and defines their light, until it looks like a low-vaulted ceiling, the world a cloister of light strung up by each lamp post.’’

Many thanks to Alison Menzies, Elliot & Thompson and Stephen Rutt for the ARC.

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/… (mehr)

It is only very occasionally that I see skeins of geese flying overhead around where I live. However, when I do it is quite a sight to see thirty or more birds in that distinctive V formation that they have. They are passing overhead to reach Poole Harbour home to many wading birds. When I go to Poole Park I always see the giant Canada goose that seems to have made this country it’s home too. But the regular native geese are not quite as big, and if you look carefully there then you can see some of them too.

Whilst Rutt has always been a bird fan, it wasn’t until he went to live in Scotland near the Solway Firth, that he became more aware of the geese that were there. He sees thousands of pink-footed geese arriving in his hometown as they head south from the far north and Arctic.

With these arrivals comes winter.

This goose, along with the Barnacle, Greylag, Brent Bean and White-fronted become an obsession for him, he follows the skeins through the skies, revelling in the connections that they bring him to distant lands and the rhythm of the seasons. They brighten a bleak, dreich day, dragging him from a cursor blinking on a blank document to windswept fields in search of them. This interest becomes an obsession and it will take him to different parts of the country in search of these magnificent birds. Heading south for Christmas, they celebrate it with a goose, a domesticated bird that has been eaten for over 3000 years now. Spending time away from the regular day to day stuff gives him time to ponder how humans and geese have interacted over that time.

In some ways, it is quite difficult to believe that this is the second book that Rutt has had published in the same year. He is quite an accomplished writer and like his first, The Seafarers, this has just the right mix of fact and anecdote tied together with a strong narrative. There are some personal elements in here, but no more than is needed to add context to what he is writing about. One for the nature lovers bookshelf.… (mehr)

The insane craziness of London gets to people in many different ways and in 2015 it happened to Stephen Rutt. Rather than just downsize and move out to the country, he decided to take himself as far away from London as he could. This was why he found himself in North Ronaldsay, the most northerly of the Orkney Islands, at the bird observatory there. It is in these places where the open ocean meets the land where the birds that he is seeking, live. They thrive in these dynamic environments and Rutt’s experiences on these windblown edges of our coasts are the closest he can come to experiencing what an ocean-going bird feels. Most of our seabird colonies are located in Scotland and he is naturally drawn to these places, but he travels all over the UK, from Wales to Northumberland to experience other colonies of birds and to uncover a little of the history between us and the seabirds.

Rutt has a really nice writing style, informative without feeling that you are being lectured too. He describes enough detail in the scenes that he sees in his prose that you feel like you are stood alongside him as he watches the skuas stoop towards his head, or standing in the dark listening to the shearwaters return to their nests, when he takes off in tiny rickety places to hop between the islands and is buffeted by the same winds that they fly in every day in the open ocean. Woven into all of this are his observations on the landscape and geology of the places with just enough history to add context. It is a great insight into the life of the birds he is following and has a wonderful resonance. I can recommend this if you wish to know about the birds of the open ocean, skua, gannets and fulmars and also to be read in conjunction with the Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson, to get some idea of the threats that these birds are under.… (mehr)