I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.

In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?

Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.

A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by

their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism with me,

Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. This Scotland Outdoors podcast from BBC Radio Scotland.

He is responding to you then. Tell me about this owl.

It's a McKinders eagle owl, an African species of eagle owl. Very friendly bird this one. Oh, he does seem to respond to him. I don't know why. But he's a very friendly owl. When I was actually constructing one side of the Avery there, inside the Avery, I left him in there, and I also had a hammer, and he's's actually landing on my hand when the hammer was actually banging him the nail. So he's not phased by my... That's Rod Angus there from the Scottish Owl Centre in West Lothian. You're listening to the Scotland

Outdoors podcast. I'm Rachel Stewart. Now in this this edition, I find out a bit more about this facility,

which is actually home to the largest collection of owls in the world.

Now, the centre opened in 2012, but before that, Rod and his wife, Nikki,

run a smaller version of it in Argyll.

So over the years, they've built up, well, an incredible knowledge and passion for these creatures.

And you could say it all started with a screech.

The whole idea for the Scottish House Centre really started with the study of Barnowls

in where we used to live in Kintyre, in the south-west of Scotland.

And the British Trust for Ornithology launched a nationwide survey to try and determine how many barn owls there were left in the country, because it had been noticed that there had been a significant decline

largely due to changes in agriculture. So not having any experience with working with barn owls

before, we set off searching all the upland derelict farm buildings where barn owls are

known to breed and we didn't know how many there were. In fact, in the whole county of Argyle there was only thought to be a handful of barn owls

and maybe in, you know, maybe six or ten pairs or so in the whole of Argyll.

Anyway, we surveyed Kentire, which is from Campbelltown up to Tarbot,

...