Wintering A Season with Geese

You could only write a book like this starting from a deep and wide knowledge of birds, a mental reference grid which I'm guessing is so ingrained and instinctive that even someone with Rutt's habitually observing and self-observing nature might not be able to tell you the minute judgments, moment to moment, that make up the act of identification - of a bird, of a species, of an emotion. (I once was walking in Spain with a naturalist friend who exclaimed, pointing at the other side of a kilometre-deep gorge several horizontal kilometres away, “Look at those marvellous walnut trees!”. “How do you know they’re walnuts?” I said, peering. “They just are,” he said.)

And then on top of that, Rutt’s prose, so unadorned and clear, with those deep flashes of condensed imagery. In The Seafarers it was the gannets that got me, with their folded origami wings; in Wintering I was stopped dead by “The chiaroscuro after the storm”. The light on the Dumfries hillsides after the weather had blown over. Wow. Rutt’s writing is full of light, of winter gleams on marshes, of operatic dawns, of wide Essex skies and crystalline Dumfries mornings; the counterpoints of dullness and fog and interiors. His best life is outdoors; you can imagine him out in the weather, under the wind. Because the endearing thing about these books is how he draws himself in the picture, so that you can see him, possibly standing to one side with his shoulders a little hunched, separate like one of his beloved razorbills.

Wintering has a narrower focus than Seafarers. You can see Rutt refining, theorising; striving to explain his visceral need to classify, to categorise, to make ever smaller and more exact distinctions. One side-effect of this is that there are more goose descriptions than us civilians can really take in. I think he may not know that many people don’t have an internal bird-book template which you can fill in with data and immediately internalise: shape in flight, tick; juvenile colouring, tick. Someone like me, who owns binoculars and can just about identify the easier garden birds, starts to flounder marshily. So that’s the goose which is all browny-grey with black wingtips and, um. No, that was the other one. Hmm.

The amount of goose-detail would be forbidding if it weren’t for the appealing backdrop of Dumfries homelife, of Rutt’s humility and honesty. “I am no good in emergencies,” he tells us. Or, “Marshlands are the land of my heart.” We want to know more about his partner Miranda and the cat Morag: partly out of affectionate nosiness and partly as a respite from the high airless peaks of goose identification where mere mortals cannot survive for long.

When a friend asks him what the point is of his goose quest, he’s baffled that anyone would ask the question. He tells us the answer, though: “A way of understanding the world around me. A way of understanding me.”