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.

30 Days Wild - Day 30: Saving the bats til last

Well it's the last day of "30 days wild", what shall I post for our last wild activity of the month?....

Why not go for the obvious, which I've somehow managed to avoid posting until now?!

Tonight we'll be be undertaking a bat survey on a site in the hills above Huddersfield. Bat surveys are the mainstay of our work from the end of June through to the end of September, albeit with a scattering of other surveys and habitat management work in between. We usually get called in to survey a building when someone wants to undertake building work that requires planning permission as the planners need to be satisfied that the favourable conservation status of these European protected species will not be significantly affected by the proposals.

Its a habitat assessment and "emergence survey" tonight. 

First we'll be checking all around and inside the building in question for bats or signs of bat use which might be droppings, staining or even the sound of bat chatter if there is a big roost present - particularly on a hot day like today. We record all of the features that bats might use for roosting which could be anything from a single bit of missing mortar under a ridge tile, up to a large loft where bats could fly up and down until they're ready to come out after dark.

Once on that's done we set ourselves up in suitable positions outside the building, at least 15 minutes before sunset, waiting for any bats roosting in the building to emerge. Different bat species emerge at different stages of darkness starting with the larger bats (noctule and Leisler's bats), which often come out before sunset and can be easily mistaken for birds flying high across the sky. Then the pipistrelle species are next, which are usually all out within 30 minutes of sunset. At the opposite end of the spectrum the long-eared bats might not emerge from their roosts until 1 hour after sunset, when it's almost completely dark. We watch the building until 1 hour and 30 minutes after sunset to make sure we don't miss any emerging bats.

Every site can come up with surprises, sometimes we don't have a single bat, other nights we might have a soprano pipistrelle maternity roost of 200 bats! Who knows that tonight's survey will bring.

We don't often get to see bats this close up - this was taken during one of our bat box checks at Seckar Wood

Well done to everyone else who's being taking part in 30 Days Wild.

30 Days Wild - Day 29: Walkabout

Another office day writing a bat licence application, nothing wild about that!

With a letter to post and a visit to make 2 miles away I decided to ditch the car and get some evening air.

It's not a very picturesque walk but along the way I heard a green woodpecker over the horse fields, I didn't realise we got them so close to home.

There was even a bat circling the house when I got home, there's no getting away from them today!

30 Days Wild - Day 28: Being a friend to nature

Everybody needs good friends and nature reserves are no exception!

The Friends of Seckar Wood are a committed band of volunteers who help look after the various special habitats on this Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) near Woolley, south of Wakefield. 

Today's task was "balsam bashing". Another invasive non-native plant that rapidly colonises riverbanks and damp woodlands (Seckar falling under the latter category) where it shades out the native ground flora.

It's a very shallow rooted annual plant which makes pulling it up very easy, so perhaps balsam pulling would be a better way to describe it. The pulling must be done before the plant flowers and sets seed.

Despite being small in number we got a good area cleared today. The idea being that repeating the same area over 2-3 years should eradicate the plant from that areas.

We also put up a couple of my home made bird boxes on trees in the woodland too so something else to keep an eye on when we visit.

30 Days Wild - Day 27: For Peats' sake

What cracking weather to be out in the garden - catching up with all the jobs we couldn't do because we were too busy revising, about gardening!

We were running low on a few gardening essentials so off I went down t'shops. One of thing we needed was multipurpose compost to fill a couple of new hanging baskets (I know - we're not exactly at the cutting edge of garden fashion!). I noticed that B&Q were doing a very reasonably priced "peat free" compost so I thought I'd give it a go.

Normal compost is almost always peat, sometimes 100% peat, other times it's "peat based" with other stuff mixed in. The reason peat is so good as a compost is that it has just the right balance of moisture retention and drainage for raising and growing most plants.

However, peat is a raw material which takes thousands of years to form in the lowland raised bogs from which it is extracted. These bogs have a diverse flora and fauna that have evolved to survive in this unique and increasingly rare habitat. Once it's gone, it's gone. Is it really worth losing these habitats and all the species that rely on them just so we can have a nice hanging basket?!

So as conservationists we really should always be avoiding peat based composts in the garden. 

If it doesn't say "peat free" or "peat reduced" on the bag, then it almost certainly has peat in it, even if it says other things like "environmentally friendly" or "organic" it may still be peat based.

There are a small number of alternative peat products which you can buy with a clear ecological conscience; such as Moorland Gold which is made from peat gathered through water filtration rather than by digging it all up.

Peat free composts can be based on a range of materials, usually waste products from another industry such as composted wood chippings or even coconut fibres (coir).

This compost looks ok so far, but the proof will be in the growing I suppose.

p.s. if you thought this post was about reviewing whisky I can only apologise, maybe I'll try that this evening?

30 Days Wild - Day 26: Strimming in the rain!

Half way through mowing the lawn the heavens opened (completely un-forecast - well done met office!).

A bit annoying, maybe, but at least partially offset by this rainbow over the garden.

The award for "most resourceful bird of the day" goes to a wren at one of our bat sites near Doncaster. Rather than build its own nest it decided it would be far better to convert an old swallows nest instead!