Magpies, Dark Skies and Cairngorms Pride

Scotland Outdoors

BBC

Nature, Society & Culture, Science

4.7 • 709 Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2025

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Cairngorms Pride is a new nature-led organisation set up in Cairngorms National Park with the motto: “here for the planet, queer for the planet”. Rachel chats to Dan Cottam and Kath Pierce about the social enterprise.

Coinneach Rankin and Hamish Macleod are climbers and filmmakers who make the series Dàna on BBC Alba in which they capture their adventures in the outdoors. Helen Needham joins them in Lochaber to discuss their approach to adventuring, filmmaking and the Gaelic language.

The first grey seal pups of the season are at Forvie National Nature Reserve in Aberdeenshire. Mark meets Reserve Manager Catriona Reid to discover how to observe the seals without disturbing them.

Phil Sime and Morven Livingstone take to the Caledonian canal to speak to Robert Gordon from Inverness Rowing Club about how the club is making the sport more accessible.

A mother-daughter duo are co-authoring a memoir called Sea Legs. The book follows 11-year-old competitive para swimmer Oona Dooks and her mother Eleanor Thom in their travels across the UK coast and beyond. Mark joins the pair at Montrose Basin to discover what they’ve learnt about caring through the lens of the natural world.

Rachel meets Biosphere Dark Sky ranger Elizabeth Tindal at Crawick Multiverse in Dumfries and Galloway to find out how best to adjust our eyes to the dark and observe the stars.

The Woodland Carbon Code is the UK’s standard for woodland creation projects that aim to generate credible carbon credits. Mark and Rachel are joined by Pat Snowdon of Scottish Forestry to find out how to code is contributing towards Scotland’s net zero targets.

Mark discusses the often misunderstood magpie with author Esther Woolfson, who shared her home with a magpie for eight years.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts.
0:07.3	Hello, I'm Kimberly Wilson. I'm a psychologist, and in my new podcast, Complex, I'll be your guide
0:14.4	through all the information and misinformation that's out there about mental health.
0:19.0	I'm joined by expert guests covering topics
0:21.9	from people pleasing to perfectionism,
0:24.2	burnout to empathy,
0:25.9	to find tangible advice
0:27.3	so we can understand ourselves a little better.
0:30.5	Complex with me, Kimberly Wilson.
0:33.0	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:36.4	This Scotland Outdoors podcast from BBC Radio Scotland.
0:46.4	Hello and thank you very much for choosing to listen to this.
0:49.0	We do a couple of Scotland outdoors podcasts every week,
0:51.8	one of which is built from the live programme we do for BBC Radio Scotland called Out of Doors.
0:57.0	And this week we're all about the full moon and magpies.
1:02.3	Right, this week's outdoor autumno vignette.
1:06.1	I was driving up from, well basically, what would be, fetter cairn, up over the Cairn of Mount, heading towards Bankery and a Boin. So you're driving up through the mist. About a third of the way up the hill, on the left-hand side, there is a ruined cottage. The roof is missing. And on top of the chimney breast, or where the chimney pots would have been, there were three, I thought there were red grouse, there might have been partridge sitting there, and it was just, it was misty, I could just see them in no more, and I thought, well that's odd, why are they doing that? As I drove past the cottage, on the other side of the glen, there was a whole line of beaters with the sticks and the plastic flags, driving game birds in front of them. So these game birds are obviously thought, tell you what, we'll get out of the way of the guns, but we want to see what's actually happening at the same time. Run, Charlie, run! You know, whatever it was. But just, it really stuck in my head that picture. Good morning. I'm Mark Stephen. Sit on the other side of the fire pit, Rachel Stewart. How am I supposed to top that? Come on. I don't know. It's mild as anything. I'm sitting here with my big winter jacket on and I'm actually hot. It's 11 degrees. Something like that. And it's been, you know, a funny week. Misty. Really misty. Kind of getting sick of that now. I could be doing with slightly colder temperatures,
2:19.4	but a nice clear view.
2:20.6	Yeah, no, I came down, you know,
2:22.8	over the kernel, I came down across the other side
2:24.8	into basically the South D-Side Road.
2:28.4	Stunning.
	...

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