Rail Infrastructure Project – bat mitigation monitoring

As part of the licence conditions for a rail infrastructure project various bat boxes were erected as part of the mitigation and monitoring agreement with Natural England. We were asked to carry out annual bat box checks and have carried out over 500 checks in the last 2 years in some quite remote and challenging sites. Checks were carried out from rope & harness as well as from Mobile Elevated Work Platforms (MEWP’s). Bats were handled to record species, sex, age and to assess the likely roost types. 100’s of DNA sample was also collected and processed to identify the species that had used the boxes when bats were not currently present. We’ve also erected many of these boxes that were inspected.

The bat boxes located in trees were inspected by climbing the trees with rope and harness and the boxes that were located on utility poles were access by a MEWP as a safer method of inspecting the boxes to prevent any harm that might have been caused to the bats if slipping whilst climbing the poles with spikes, harness and strops.