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 from BBC Radio Scotland with Mark Stephen and Helen Needham.

Hello and thanks very much for choosing to listen to this podcast. I'm Mark Stephen. It's fair to say we're pretty lucky. We get to meet some really nice people, interesting people who do remarkable things. And Andy Howard is one of them. Andy's a wildlife photographer. Now, he's pretty prolific on social media, so you may well have seen his images

and mountain hares and the like, but for the last eight years he's been taking photographs of one of

Scotland's most elusive creatures, the otter, and he's gathered them all together in a new book

called The Secret Life of the Otter, which is a stunning collection of photographs and recollections of

his encounters with these fascinating animals. A few weeks ago, on a typical Scottish spring day,

and by that I mean there was rain, hail and sunshine, Helen Needham and I met up with them at

North Kessik, just the other side of the Buley Firth from Inverness.

We began by taking a walk along the shoreline there, and I asked him,

how did you first get interested in Otters?

When I was a very small boy, my auntie and uncle had a house on Mull,

so we used to go there on our summer holidays. And we were camping on one of the beaches.

We were going to Iona the next day.

And I went to the rocks to have a wee.

And up on the rock popped an otter.

And we made eye contact and we stared at each other.

And I thought it was a small dog.

So I went back to my parents and said,

...