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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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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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. more