Publisher Description

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  

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Short Lease 1Rising Damp 131 Summer in a Blizzard 17First Swallow 352 The Lengthening Light 37Egrets 553 Fractured Rhythms 59Dragonflies 794 Living Landscapes 83Natterjack Toad 1015 The Reaping 105Solstice 1256 Silence Descends 129Nightjar 1477 Fluctuations 151Soprano Pipistrelle 1738 The Illusion of Wildness 179Wasp Spider 2019 Ghosts of Summer Future 205Last Swallow 223Acknowledgements 227Notes 229Index 239

Details