College ensures bats are kept safe

Abseilers installing bat boxes at Hopwood Hall College

Hopwood Hall College has installed roosting boxes to ensure that any bats living in buildings due to be demolished are kept safe.

Some unused residents’ blocks at the College are being demolished to make way for the College’s new Technology Centre.

In a series of dawn and dusk monitoring sessions the College learnt that they have one of the largest maternity roosts of pipestrelle bats recorded in Greater Manchester.

This meant the Technology Centre Project Team were required by Natural England to provide a range of mitigation measures to replace the buildings they needed to demolish.

So the College installed specialist roosting boxes on trees in the surrounding woodland.

Some extra boxes were also needed at buildings that lay on the observed flight path of the bats between the woodland areas. One particular location they had to cover was at the very top and the back of the College’s ‘Littleborough’ building.

Rob Trueblood, Capital Project Manager at the College, said: “We couldn’t get ‘cherry picker’ access to this part of the building, so the best way was to engage some skilled abseilers who pronounced this ‘a nice little job’; armed with boxes and drills they swung into action and installed the items in a morning.”