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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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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Today's themes were Cumulative effects, Tools and technology, Mitigation and compensation and Future challenges.

Again, a huge amount of interesting and relevant information which will immediately be put into practice. Our approach to ecology for wind farm developments is going to get a right good shake up next week! I'm not going to go through all the good stuff about measuring and adjusting for impact, and associated stats - that's not for this forum, I am going to take a philosophical direction tonight.

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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

After 7 days on site, I thought it was time to give you an insight into what has happened so far. Legacy habitat have put in the fence along the phase1 receptor site (although due to rubble could not follow the embankment to the north). We then carried out a destructive search of all the rubble/debris left at the north of the site. more