I am still busy surveying.
Surveying birds, invertebrates and plants. I am surveying in Yorkshire, County Durham, the Midlands and a very interesting project in southern England, in a county I don’t normally visit, but the opportunity was too good to miss. And I am helping the Natural History Museum with specimen identification (spiders) on a project they are working on in the New Forest. And in six days time, I will be looking for a lynx in Yorkshire on a Site of Special Scientific Interest. So I am busy and working on a number of diverse projects; not all of them development related. So, if you are an NGO such as a Wildlife Trust, please do get in touch with me too. Perhaps you want to know if you have a lynx on your site?
And if you’re a developer and are worried about having a lynx on your site (or even a wolf), please do get in touch too; I might be able to help you out. Whilst lynxes are unlikely (but not inconceivable) to be discovered on a brownfield site, it is highly likely that the site will literally be crawling with wolves…of the smaller kind. And if you don’t sufficiently consider these creatures, then it could present considerable negative publicity and delays – see here for a campaign run by Buglife on a proposed development on a London brownfield site, which went to Court and received national publicity.
Summer is an excellent time to carry out invertebrate surveys (and they can be undertaken in spring and autumn too), but also habitat (Phase 1 and NVC) and bird surveys (vantage point and/ or transects) for wind farm developments. I’m still busy surveying until early July, but with plenty of opportunity available for the rest of the month and in to August and September too. So whilst the summer will be filled with distracting sporting events (Euro 2012; Wimbledon and the London Olympics), don’t let your attention get diverted, at least until you’ve booked your ecology surveys in!
Richard Wilson Ecology 