Baker Consultants Ltd

Planning the ecology requirements of your project will save you money! By reducing the potential for delays or surprises you can complete your project on-time and in-budget.

Here are our top 5 tips for clients:

1. If you have a question, phone or email us. We will happily get you started thinking about what you might need to do – for free!


2. Be aware of the seasonal constraints on survey. Many species have to be surveyed in the spring or summer, if you miss the survey window it could mean a full years delay.


3. Get your work programmed with an ecologist as early as spossible If you wait, for example, until April to schedule a Great Crested Newt survey, you could find it hard to find someone available to do it (or be charged an arm and a leg by someone inexperienced and unqualified – not us!). April, May and June are our busiest months of the year.


4. Get everything ready – site maps, access arrangements, development plans, risk assessments, confidentiality agreements, can all be prepared ahead of field work and will speed things up considerably when the project kicks off.


5. If something doesn’t make sense, if you want to talk through a project in the pipeline – phone us!

Susan writes: Every ecologist I have spoken to regards training opportunities as important. In the after-hours discussions at conferences “What training do you get?” usually crops up more frequently than questions about bonus procedures. Finding good training is hard though.

There seem to be lots of introductory courses for people at the start of their careers but not much to move on to for those of us who are 5yrs+ in.

Because they are mainly practically based (and why not?), they are often in the spring and summer. Seriously, how valuable is it to spend your weekends in May and June on courses when you’re putting in 60hrs Monday to Friday?

Phew-ey! (writes Kelly) We have moved 45 slow worms this week alone - bringing our slow worm total to 198. Some have been painted with pink nail varnish (No7 Rose truffle to be precise) to make sure i'm not catching the same ones - but no, i haven't re caught a pink one yet!

There was also an emotional moment this week - first happiness and glee when I caught a male common lizard, followed by sadness (and a bit of disgust) when I realised it was dead, especially as I had seen it under the same mat, and tried so hard to catch it but missed - TWICE before hand!!

Does anyone out there have a fail-safe way of filling in pre-qualification forms? Of course not! We’re even sending Diana on a course to learn about them. I’d really like to get a group of Local Authority procurement people in a room to justify why they are all different and admit which bits are completely arbitrary.

The scoring system for example, it’s all in the weighting, and unless we understand it, we just don’t know if a job is worth pursuing. The forms are so long, it’s a serious investment devoting time to these things and if there’s a ‘killer question’ in there it’s an utter waste of time.

For example the trading for more than one year (or sometimes 3 years) clause that pops up a lot. We have tons of experience running particular types of projects but if we wont be considered until we have the right number of years accounts it seems pointless proceeding.