The Agency is the sort of place where anything can happen.
Last week for instance, Mr. Rowley rushed out of his office, binoculars in hand, imploring the entire third floor to look out of the window. "An Otter! An Otter!" he excitedly cried. Sure enough, across the Water of Leith, a sleekit beastie was swimming alongside and exploring the nooks and crannies of the opposite quayside.
The combined wildlife expertise of the floor was put to the test and found wanting.
I've seen otters in the Highlands and thought it might be one, although it would have been a fantastically rare spot, in the middle of a city. Matthew from Finance thought it might be a humongously large rat. Despite pointing a Nikon 300mm lens at it, while hanging out the windows, we couldn't tell what it was definitively.
So Mr. Rowley and Chris, the owner of the aforementioned Nikon, donned coats and ran downstairs to get a closer look. This was the fastest any of us have seen either of them move.
The otter was not phased by being pursued and photographed by two fast walking gents. It even poked its head out of its hiding hole as if to ask, "What are you two up to? Do you want to make something of it?" Mr. Rowley later confessed he had been ready to turn on his heels just in case of an otter attack.
Chris managed to get off a few good snaps and here's the inquisitive fellow querying his pursuers' right to exist.
A quick photo comparison on the web ruled out the intial otter theory.
Our identification attempts then veered wildly from stoats to weasels to an outside bet on a pine martin. This was proved to be fanciful as Gerry Farrell our resident wildlife expert looked in on the excitement and then at the pic, nonchalantly pronouncing, "That's a mink. Hard bastards mink - they'll fight anything."
So what we saw was a "Leith Otter."