I had thought that 2011 would be a year of consolidation however it turned out to be one of continued expansion and forward planning. Not only did our client base increase along with turnover but we also expanded the in-house team with Carlos Abrahams joining us as Technical Director

New guidance has been published on the assessment and reporting required under Article 17 of the Habitats Directive including marine habitats and species.

In his Autumn Statement last week, the Chancellor George Osborne set out his views on how to improve the economy and tackle the debt crisis. Amongst other matters, he included a few comments in relation to UK environmental legislation that have not gone down well with conservation bodies such as the RSPB and Wildlife Trusts.

Paul reports on his trip to the Mammal Society Conference in Bangor. He attended talks on Dormice, badger mitigation and brown hares among other creatures and had a great group for his SM2 workshop. Read the full story here.

Well, we're past the mid-point and have decided to unveil the Baker Consultants Movember Mos for your delictation. You can visit our site and donate your cash.... or just laugh and appreciate the itchyness!

It took almost a whole season of survey to discover, but after monthly checks having setting out nest boxes and tubes in early June, dormice (Muscardinus avellanarius)  were discovered in hedges at a site in the south west of England.

This newsflash has just been received from Natural England announcing the withdrawal of its reptile mitigation guidelines.

Consultants and interested parties are being encouraged to provide contributions to the re-drafting process, but the contact details do not appear to be on the NE web site but can be found on the IEEM web site. Please feel free to add a comment below.

The European Commission has published new guidance on Wind Energy developments and Natura 2000.

Natural England has launched new guidelines on survey and site mitigation for reptiles, producing a single set of standards for good practice in reptile ecology work. It is aimed at developers, local authorities and consultants.

All species of reptile are now on the UK Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) priority list, so their conservation has to be taken into account during the planning process, whenever a site supports populations of grass snake, slow worm, common lizard or other reptiles.

Our consultant ecologist Kelly Clark writes;

In a very short period of time the SM2BAT from Wildlife Acoustics has become recognised as an industry-standard remote bat detector and is widely used by consultants, universities and researchers.

Superior field equipment that records more calls brings with it the challenge of larger volumes of data to analyse.

Baker Consultants is now able to offer a full data processing service to assist in the analysis of bat survey field recordings. Using our library of bat call ‘recognisers’ our experienced bat ecologists can provide a cost-effective, independent analysis of SM2 recordings.