Barn owl survey licences

Following our recent attendance at two excellent courses run by the Barn Owl Trust we are now both registered to use Natural England class licence CL29 - "To survey for barn owl (Tyto alba) for the purposes of assessing the potential impacts of future development".

Many of the buildings we already survey for bats in rural areas have the potential to support roosting or nesting barn owl, which are protected from disturbance whilst nesting. This licence will allow us to legally disturb nesting barn owl for the purposes of pre-development surveys.

A barn owl chick we got to see up-close whilst on the Barn Owl Trust course

The welfare of the barn owls is paramount when undertaking surveys - knowing when it is safe to stay or when it is essential to leave a nest site is crucial in ensuring that the eggs or young in the nest are not harmed.

This along with the many useful facts and techniques we learnt on the Barn Owl Trust courses will help us confidently advise our clients on barn owl conservation on their sites.

More details of this and our other recent activities will be in our summer edition of "The Nutshell" which will be available soon....

Petrol powered plant punisher

First day at Thunder Bridge Meadows today, cutting Himalayan balsam. It's the first step in a control program which aims to keep this invasive, non-native plant out of the diverse wildflower meadows on this site. Cutting the plants before they can set seed over 2-3 seasons should confine it to the edges of the site along the river and allow the other plants to grow without alien competition to contend with.

Our main weapon today was the powerscythe, a 230cc petrol powered grass cutter which is basically a big set of hedge shears on wheels. It makes short work of the fleshy balsam stems so long as you manage to avoid anything on the ground which might break the teeth; rocks, stumps or sticks that were never retrieved when thrown into the meadow for the dog!

It does have tendency to shake itself to pieces unfortunately, which it duly did by mid-afternoon today! No matter, it did what we needed it to do and the rest we'll tackle with the brush cutter or by hand over the next week or so.

Before we leave the site we make sure everything is cleaned off: boots, tools and the powerscythe to make sure we don't move any seed off site.

We'll be using the powerscythe again at the end of the month to do the annual hay cut here and at Denby Delph, another Garganey Trust site that we help manage.