Overview

Summer is traditionally a time of plenty, of warmth; a time to celebrate abundance. And so Stephen Rutt sets out to explore the natural world during its moment of fullest bloom. Butterflies and dragonflies add colour to his days; moths and bats lift the warm nights; swallows, nightjars and wood warblers fill the forests and skies. What Stephen notices too, however, are the many ways in which the season is becoming deranged by a changed and changing climate: the wrong birds singing at the wrong time; August days as cold as February; the creeping disturbances that we may not notice while nature still has some voice.    The Eternal Season is both a celebration of summer and a warning of the unravelling of this beautiful web of abundant life. It sings with love and careful observation, with an eye on all that we might lose – but also save.  ‘Here is nature in all its glory . . . Rutt’s account of this time is poetic, clean, spare, compelling, leavened with wry humour and urgency.’ BBC Wildlife   ‘[A] passionately argued and provocative book.’ The Countryman  ‘As you progress into the text you see it pull away from the crowd to deliver something more meaningful, something that lingers longer . . . A well-written, accessible and engaging book containing some real gems.’ BTO News  ‘Elegant, vivid, thoroughly absorbing . . . strikes the perfect balance between celebrating the natural world and sounding a realistic warning about the damage we continue to wreak on it. All in all, a treat.’ Lev Parikian, author of Into the Tangled Bank  ‘An exquisitely observed celebration of summer and of the way in which the season is increasingly disorientated.’ Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller  ​

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9781783966462

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Author Information

Stephen Rutt is an award-winning writer, birder and book reviewer whose work has appeared in the Guardian Country Diary, EarthLines Magazine, Zoomorphic, The Harrier, Surfbirds and BirdGuides. He is author of The Seafarers: A Journey Among Birds, which won the Saltire First Book of the Year in 2019, a Roger Deakin Award and was longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2019 and, most recently, Wintering: A Season with Geese. Stephen currently lives in Dumfries.

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