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.

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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;

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Natural England has released new mitigation guidelines for reptiles. The pdf is available for download here TIN102.

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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 more