A Cornucopia of Wildlife including Bees, Dolphins and Beetles
Scotland Outdoors
BBC
4.7 • 756 Ratings
🗓️ 7 March 2026
⏱️ 84 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The impact of cruise ship light pollution on bird species is the focus of research presented at Scotland’s Nature Student Conference at Stirling University. Rachel chats to Adam Woodward who explored the issue as part of his master’s degree.
Cromarty is home to one of the world’s longest running bottlenose dolphin research programmes. Phil Sime and Morven Livingstone join Research Fellow Dr Barbara Cheney from Aberdeen University to discover how AI is helping to uncover new insights into the dolphin population.
In Milngavie, Mark talks to Dr Davide Dominoni of Glasgow University about how wildlife copes with and adapts to urban environments.
Back at Scotland’s Nature Student Conference, Rachel talks to whale scientist Dr Penny Clarke about studying mass stranding from space.
Mark is at Abernethy Forest Lodge with RSPB Residential Volunteer Catriona MacIntosh to find out how beetle surveys are contributing to a habitat disturbance and restoration project designed to improve capercaillie habitat and wider biodiversity.
In this week’s podcast excerpt, Rachel speaks to poet Anne Wiseman about Crovie’s past and its fragile future.
Queen bees are emerging from their hibernation into the spring sun. Rachel and Mark are joined by Paul Hetherington of BugLife to find out what bees are up to at this time of year and how we can support them in our own gardens.
Dr Désirée Coral’s exhibition ‘Essays on Salt – The First Harvest’ incorporates salt alongside glass, clay, video, photography, and ready-made objects tied to salt harvesting and trade. Mark meets Désirée at the Worm Gallery in Aberdeen to find out how she harvested seawater and evaporated it herself in St Andrews and Aberdeen to create the exhibition.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm no longer ravenous. I'll no longer eat until I fall asleep. |
| 0:11.0 | The Hunger Game, a new five-part series exploring the meteoric rise of weight loss drugs. |
| 0:16.0 | It's been an incredible story with these drugs. |
| 0:18.1 | The uptake, the amount of product that's been sold, the amounts of money |
| 0:21.2 | is cost. What the drugs do, how they work, and the knock-on effects of their widespread use. |
| 0:26.5 | We'll be sitting here in three years' time going, oh, it caused problems that we're now going to have to fix. |
| 0:32.3 | The Hunger Game with me, Professor Gilesio. Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:39.1 | This Scotland Outdoors podcast from BBC Radio Scotland. |
| 0:47.9 | Hello and thanks very much for choosing to listen to this. |
| 0:50.5 | As you know, we build a couple of Scotland Outdoors podcasts every week, |
| 0:54.1 | one of which is cunningly crafted from the live program we do for BBC Radio Scotland, |
| 0:59.2 | which is called Out of Doors. |
| 1:00.5 | And this week it's a bit of a wildlife extravaganza. |
| 1:07.8 | There's pink and blue in the sky, |
| 1:09.7 | and the trees are standing in stark silhouette |
| 1:12.3 | Against the sky |
| 1:13.8 | There's definitely a light up there |
| 1:14.9 | Yesterday I was coming up from Edinburgh |
| 1:16.8 | And it's a city bypass |
| 1:18.9 | Pentlands were covered in snow |
| 1:20.8 | Blue skies, really beautiful |
... |
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