The Outdoor Gibbon

Deer are one of Scotland’s most iconic animals, yet they keep getting cast as the villain. We sit down with a Scottish Game Fair panel featuring James Fenton alongside Megan Rowlands, Tom Turnbull, Scott Mackenzie, and Bill Cowie to ask a harder question: what is the real role of deer on the hill when you zoom out to ecology, rural livelihoods, and culture? We dig into why “ideal” deer numbers don’t exist without clear land management objectives, and how deer influence upland grazing systems...

Wildfire doesn’t need Hollywood flames to become a crisis, it just needs the right fuel load, a dry spell, and one careless spark. We sit down with Richard Bailey of the Peak District Moorland Group and Callum Kippen, a Highland grouse keeper and co-owner of Bright Spark training, to talk about what’s really driving wildfire risk across UK moorland and peatland, from the Scottish Highlands to the Peak District National Park. We get into the on-the-ground reality of the Carrbridge Dava fire, ...

Vegan. Hunter. Mostly vegetarian. If you think those words can’t sit in the same room without a fight, this conversation will surprise you. We’re joined by Mark, an author and stand-up comedian who once went fully vegan, then slid back toward an 80% vegetarian life, and he’s candid about why: ethics, habit, comfort, lockdown, travel, and the simple fact that food is never just food. We talk about the part of veganism that rarely gets airtime the quieter middle, where people genuinely care ab...

Two months of silence can look like a content gap from the outside, but sometimes it’s just life hitting hard. I open with a personal update on why the Outdoor Giving Podcast went quiet, then pivot back to what we do best: honest conversations from the field that show the reality of hunting, deer management, and countryside work without the polished fantasy. From a kitchen table in Aberdeenshire, I’m joined by Alex from Hunter Gatherer Cooking to unpack his Scotland trip and the bigger “why”...

The weather was brutal this year—snowed in for days, then floods that turned fields into lakes—but the hardest storm we unpack is personal. We sit down with Emma, a countryside stalwart and lifelong field sports devotee, to trace how a charming “pest controller” built an entire false identity, from forged stalking certificates to a decorated military persona that never existed. What starts as an engaging story about pest control, deer management, and rural life becomes a raw exploration of co...