Wintering: A Season With Geese

By Stephen Rutt

The new season begins. The geese return... Selected as a NATURE BOOK OF THE YEAR by The Times

The arrival of huge flocks of geese in the UK is one of the most evocative and powerful harbingers of winter; a vast natural phenomenon to capture the imagination. So Stephen Rutt found when he moved to Dumfries one autumn, coinciding with the migration of thousands of pink-footed geese who spend their winter in the Firth. Thus began an extraordinary odyssey.

From his new surroundings in the north to the wide open spaces of his childhood home in the south, Stephen traces the lives and habits of the most common species of goose in the UK and explores the place they have in our culture, our history and, occasionally, on our festive table.

Wintering takes you on a vivid tour of the inbetween landscapes the geese inhabit, celebrating the short days, varied weathers and long nights of the season during which we share our home with these large, startling, garrulous and cooperative birds.

Praise for Wintering:

"A poignant testament to how we can find peace in the rhythms of the natural world." - The Times, Nature Books of the Year 2019

"Illuminating history and descriptive nature writing make Wintering an understated gem." - Waterstones.com, Gifts for Nature Lovers

"Rutt's dreamy prose is as cool and elegant as the season he charts." - Jon Dunn, BBC Wildlife

"I will never look at geese the same again. Strangely, I can't wait for winter." - Caught by the River

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elliott & Thompson
• Release date: Sep 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783964550

Stephen Rutt

Stephen Rutt is an award-winning writer, birder, and book reviewer whose work has appeared in EarthLines Magazine, Zoomorphic, The Harrier, Surfbirds, BirdGuides and the East Anglian Times. He is author of The Seafarers: A Journey Among Birds, which won the Saltire First Book of the Year in 2019, and Wintering: A Season with Geese. Stephen currently lives in Dumfries.

Reviews for Wintering

[pdcread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.