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the Scotland outdoors podcast brought you by BBC Radio Scotland hello and a warm welcome to

out of doors here on BBC Radio Scotland.

I'm Mark Stephen and he's up in Sutherland. My father was a great ornithologist,

Desmond and Nelson. In fact he was the first ornithologist in the world to write books about four different bird species.

So my first experience was at the age of three being dragged over peatland

to see a blackthroated diver's nest,

which is actually a very rare bird.

And I cried the whole time.

Not with happiness.

Absolutely not with happiness.

I was cold and I was hungry,

but I do remember it vividly.

And that really was the beginning of my contact with nature.

But that call of the diver is just so evocative of the highlands.

I mean, that's a good place to start.

It's a wonderful place to start.

And we were so lucky, so lucky, because as part of my father's research,

we'd take off to North Sutherland, to Northwest Sutherland,

...