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Hello and welcome to the Scotland Outdoors podcast.

Thank you very much for downloading us.

I'm Mark Stephen.

And I'm here in Michael Wraith.

And this week, I've been visiting some seahorse babies and exploring the mysteries of the shipping forecast.

For donkey's years, we've been going to a place called our gatti, which is actually not

famous for donkeys, but for red kites.

But they've got another species in there now, squirrels, and absolutely hit lucky with

them.

Fantastic.

I also had a very interesting chat with a woman who's taken over as chief executive of Scottish

Natural Heritage, Francesca,

she's in the midst at the moment of actually touring all the National Nature Reserves in Scotland

in rather a novel way. I met up with her at 4V Nature Reserve near Aberdeen.

So at the moment I'm on what we're calling cycle for nature,

and this is me as a relatively new chief executive

wanting to visit all of S&H's 37 offices and as a keen cyclist I decided to do it by bike

...