“This month our bat ecologists completed their site involvement at the Edge Hotel at the University of Essex. Following surveys for bats we found that pipistrelle and brown long-eared bats were roosting in a 1980’s extension, scheduled for demolition, of the listed Georgian house. We were able to design mitigation by adapting a nearby building to be a suitable roost for both bat species, after we obtained a licence from Natural England. The site works could then go ahead. For this, we needed to set up exclusion devices to enable bats to leave but not re-enter the building, and we monitored this exercise. Once the bats were confirmed to be successfully excluded from the building, we could supervise the soft-strip of the roof materials from a variety of vantage points, using cherry pickers, boom lifts, fork lifts and scaffolding, to check that no bats remained under tiles or roofing felt. We were careful to phase this around the birds nesting in the soffit boxes of the building so that they were not disturbed until young had fledged. Once the supervised soft-strip was completed, we were able to give the all-clear for demolition to take place, with no risk to bats”.
Mitigation and translocation services at Ecology consultancy
