Stephen Rutt

Me standing in front of some reeds looking authorial.

I'm offering mentoring sessions now for writers of non-fiction.

One-to-one video call, 2000 words of your writing reviewed with honest feedback and pointers for development.

More information here: stephenrutt.com/mentoring/

Common blue butterfly upper wings

Common blue butterfly under wings

Several bog asphodel plants

A really big orchid

A walk in Galloway: common blues, bog asphodel & big orchids.

Cinnabar moth, red hind wings glowing.

When the cinnabar finds the sunlight in a shady hedge.

Red kite circling in front of billowing grey clouds

Kite and clouds.

Bath tub in the forest

Round leaved sundew

Coltsfoot gone to seed

Dawn breaking reluctantly over a loch

(unseen, the grim slog of bird surveying: 1.30am alarms, the frigid chill of pre-dawn uplands, cold enough for the shiver of snipe song, cuckoos keeping themselves warm by cuckooing, the ecstatic swan-diving of tree pipits, hours of fruitless waiting and grey dawns, days going nowhere)

Full moon descending behind hill, mist in the valley, stars above

Dawn down a valley

Panorama of pines, distant hillside and hint of loch

A strip of sunrise across a hill

Scenes from a series of Galloway dawns.

Thanks James, I'm sure you'll love it too

The Cuckoo’s Lea: the forgotten history of birds and places We remember places through their birds. We remember the corners of suburban woods where Eurasian Sparrowhawks Accipiter nisus lurk, the...

Michael Warren has written a terrific book about birds, people and the past. I've reviewed it for British Birds. britishbirds.co.uk/journal/arti... @drmjwarren.bsky.social

Hair ice bursting out of a stick, surrounded by dead beech leaves.

Close up on hair ice on back of leaf

Close up of hair ice on a stick, the filaments of frost lifting up like hair.

A dead tree liberally coated in white mushrooms I don't know.

Hair ice in the woods, lingering after the thaw. And a frost of fungi.

A train through the fens. It's all black fields and lines of golden reeds and hundreds of wild swans. Silvery skies. East Anglia always does something to me.

Thanks James

A flock of jackdaws departing from the silhouette of an oak tree that reaches over a fence, a hill in the background. Entire photo is underexposed and gloomy in a Gothic way.

Exit jackdaws.

Excellent! Excited for this.

A birch tree growing through a wire fence.

I love birch trees. Hard as nails. This one does not recognise your fence.

Into the last week of editing my words.

Or as I prefer to think of it, moving the matchstick furniture on my scale-model of the Titanic.

It was extraordinary - had to hold my three year old up to the window so she could share it.

Ragged peach and grey clouds, strewn across a blue sky as the sun goes down.

Last night's stormlight

Burial Bleak is so good. I love that he's wearing his own merch.

Sometimes it just works. Harder when, like tonight, they're passing in the darkness above Jimmy's Special in the blustery after-winds.

Slovenian girl, 12, saves project aiming to reintroduce cicadas to New Forest Conservationists failed to capture elusive insects this summer, so Kristina Kenda offered to step in

Love this news story: a twelve-year old girl in Slovenia is helping the cicada reintroduction to the New Forest www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Silhouette of reeds with diving ducks in the background. Apricot, blue and grey clouds in the sky.

Calm before the inevitable weekend weather.

Big skein of pink-footed geese flying through a pink sunrise with bare tree shapes.

Pink sunrise reflected in river

Frosty pink sunrise with moon

Sunrise skein. And the view in the other direction.

A peacock butterfly sunning itself on a sandstone wall.

Frost on the ground but the peacock persists, sunning on the sandstone.

In the space between dusk and dark, skein-lines drifting like a smoke

Thank you - but not half as beautiful as this morning!

Morning, furred and thorned, the delicate bite of -3.

It definitely helps!

Perfect. See you at work at one?

I am. Lunch or later?

Jan! Yes please. When's good for you?