Did you know that you can listen to many of your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds?

Like Desert Island Discs, where you can hear castaways like Cher, Gareth Southgate and Nick Cave,

and enjoy longer versions of the music they've picked.

Good things come to those who don't wait.

Listen to your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds.

The Scotland Outdoors podcast with Mark Stephen and Ewan McElwraith from BBC Radio

Scotland.

Hello and thanks very much for choosing this podcast.

I'm Mark Stephen coming to you from my home in sunny Aberdeenshire. It's a beautiful day to day. It's hard, hard frost this morning. But it's actually, if you can get out of the wind and into the winter sunshine, it's cracking. You and I have been covering stories for BBC Radio Scotland relating to the natural world, environment, rural communities for long time. We've covered

and witnessed so much change in the countryside. Yeah, be it land reform, the reintroduction

of sea eagles, the eradication of grey squirrels and the resulting increase in reds. And now

the push for rewelding. I mean, so much has happened over quite a short

period. Well, our guest on this edition of Scotland Outdoors has spent the last 20 years doing a

very similar job to us, but in print media. Patrick Barkham is the natural history writer for the

Guardian newspaper here in the UK, and is also author of a number of books,

including the butterfly aisles and badgerlands. His latest called Wild Green Wonders,

a life in nature, is a collection of his writing for the Guardian over the past two decades.

Hello, Patrick. Hello, hi Mark and Ewan. This is a really wonderful collection of essays and articles.

Your focus is not only in the United Kingdom,

but also further afield. For example, you look at wolves in Finland, you've got the South

Pacific. Now, we know from a bit of experience that sometimes persuading editors that it's

worth time investment, well, time and money investing in environmental stories can be a bit on the

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