Anyone know much about these?
There’s one firm near us charges £140, while all others are 700-1000!
The cheap one does the job fine, so the others must be on the make surely?

Edit – D’oh, chat forum……

It has to meet the expectations of the planning office. I’d start there.

Personally Id do as little as possible, pay the least possible, and FFS run around in the loft with a vacuum cleaner to suck up any batshit and moth wings you find before the surveyor arrives because the last thhing you want anywhere near your project are the arseholes at Natural England.

Our new school build was delayed for 6 months and included building a free standing bat house.
There’s loads of em round here – got one wedged in my helmet a couple of years ago.

The cheap option mentioned meets planning read so why charge £1000?

Maybe for £1,000 they guarantee not to find any 😉

check what they are quoting for. An inspection and summary report on evidence of bats may well be only £150. A night visit with ANABAT recorders, species counts, follow up surveys, mitigation proposals, work schedules etc runs into £’000s.

Dave of this very forum is bat surveyor. He’s at Eurobike but I’ll send him the signal.

Our new school build was delayed for 6 months and included building a free standing bat house.

Is that in Crawley ? If so I worked on that job, ie new school with free standing bat house.

Some years back I also worked on a site where planning permission required that the developer provide large holes in regular intervals in the closed board fencing so that badgers could gain unimpeded access.

Apparently badger sets can be several centuries old and they therefore had historical rights of way.

Now they just shoot the poor feckers.

Rule No 1 – There are no bats

When in doubt, refer to Rule No 1.

If it’s any help we sat outside one dusk and counted the bats as they came out of our ‘eves’, gave up after 500…

Barn development which backed onto my old house carried out a bat survey in November and amazingly found none. We pointed this out in our objection and they did change the plans to put in bat boxes.

Okay,

Not going to get TOO drawn on my opinion on advice that includes “run around with a vacuum cleaner” except to say that evidence of deliberate clearing up is stated in guidance to be part of the reason to determine presence, not absence….

Look, if you want to understand what planning might require try this link: http://www.bats.org.uk/pages/batsurveyguide.html – its a free download and most, if not all, planning authorities and their advising ecologists will refer to it. This should tell you (especially from the development checklist) what to expect / what might be required and whether Phase 2 surveys might be on the cards, which will up the cost. It might be a bit full-on detail wise, but any quote from consultants should be in line with this guidance.

If you are after reputable firms for comparison, try http://www.cieem.net/members-directory but a word of caution – you may miss out on some perfectly good (more local) consultants if you just rely on it.

As a personal request, please try to do it right if you can at all afford to and pass up on the advice of the err – experts – above; some of us work hard at this stuff.

Cheers
Owen

Look for them in winter you will have less chance of finding them as they will be hibernating. 🙂

I have no problem with bat surveyors and consultants and am quite friendly with mine. It’s when things get tangled up in the insidious reach of the unaccountable, unanswerable, anonymous goons from Natural England that you really wish you’d not bothered finding any bats in the first place. The actions of Natural England actually encourage developers to work around them and that’s their fault. Not to mention the dogma of most mitigation proposals with very poor statistical support of success.