The Seafarers: A Journey Among Birds
STEPHEN RUTT
(ELLIOTT & THOMPSON, 280 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064

There’s a wagtail in my garden. Further out, a gannet’s diving. The car has to be checked every day for starling nests under the bonnet. These are not boasts, but confessions. Living, as I do, in Orkney, I am always amongst birds, but don’t really notice them much. Stephen Rutt puts me to shame. His book joins the ever-expanding section in your bookshop entitled “Nature: what it does for us and what we are doing to it” – guaranteed to make you feel like David Attenborough, just less knowledgeable, more helpless.

Like Amy Liptrot’s award-winning chronicle The Outrun, this is about finding solace in nature. Rutt has panic attacks in London; he escapes to the Orkney island of North Ronaldsay, to ring birds. “I left Orkney, mostly human again, but with a seabird-shaped hole in my heart … so I travelled again, deliberately, to explore the mysteries, paradoxes and ­histories of this family of birds.”

This means visiting cliff colonies – Unst in Shetland for skuas, the Farne Islands for puffins, Skomer for Manx shearwaters. I’m reminded, as he tries to define his need for these edge places, of a D.H. Lawrence story “The Man Who Loved Islands”. It’s about searching, obsessively, for repose.