Stephen Rutt, amateur naturalist and prize-winning author
In an engaging and inspiring talk, Stephen Rutt gave an account of his journey to becoming a nature writer. He left his job in London in March 2015, to follow a Master’s degree course at Essex University, but in the intervening period took a voluntary two-month position of bird observer on North Ronaldsay, which extended to seven. Initially counting birds, he helped with sea bird ringing in the summer breeding season.
Based on his time working with sea birds there and the diary he kept, he wrote an online essay and then an anthology of his experiences. This attracted the attention of a publisher, resulting in the writing of Seafarers – A Journey Among Birds. This enabled his return to Orkney and visits to Shetland, Skomer and the Farne Islands to carry out further research for the book.
He explained that his books fall into the genre of ‘new nature writing’ where the emotional experience of the observer is recorded as much as the scientific observation of nature. His particular interests link literature and poetry with ornithology, which have a long connection exemplified by the Essex poet John Clare’s Transcription of a Nightingale (1832). The Peregrine by J.A. Baker (1967) was probably the first book in the genre which conveyed the experience of bird watching as much as the observation of peregrines. Modern nature writers seek to make sense of nature and, to an extent, record its loss. In the speaker’s own words – ‘Nature writing for me is a way of trying to make sense and understanding of nature at a time when it all seems to be getting weirder. It’s a way of reminding us what we love about nature and why we remain birding when we are surrounded by innumerable signs of loss. It’s a reminder of the pleasure and peace that nature can bring us and has brought me in my life.’
After Orkney, the speaker moved to Essex for three years, then came up to Dumfries, where he finished writing Seafarers. Over the winter he was distracted by the sight from his flat window of pink-footed geese moving in skeins between roosting and feeding grounds. He found the grey, wet Dumfries winter long, but the daily sight of geese flying over the town gave him a connection to the rhythm of the world. This inspired his second book Wintering and he returned to England to observe geese in different locations there. Unlike sea birds, the outlook for geese is good, with populations rising.
One of the attractions of geese is their long-recorded history. Domesticated descendants of grey-lagged geese at the Temple of Juno alerted the Romans to an attack on their city in 390BC. Wild geese – grey-lagged, white-fronted and red-breasted – are also accurately illustrated in a wall painting in a tomb near the Meidum pyramid in Egypt from 2,500BC. There is also an 8th-century Pictish carving of a goose and a salmon on the inner surface of a stone coffin lid from Easterton of Roseisle near Elgin on the Moray Firth. A shared cultural expectation of finding geese in the afterlife perhaps.
The reaction to the two books has been different. Readers seem to like Seafarers for its description of landscapes and journeys; and Wintering because of a liking for geese. The speaker was encouraged to know that he was part of a wider community with a shared interest. Bird and nature writing provides an opportunity for a disparate community to come together to share their love of birds. He concluded by reading an extract from Wintering, describing the dawn flight of Barnacle Geese at Caerlaverock.
D.F.D.