Badger relocation scheme leads to local school links!
Our East Midlands team is pulling out all the stops to minimise environmental impact while carrying out earthworks, landscaping, fencing and vegetation clearance work on behalf of West Midlands Combined Authority at Moseley in Birmingham.
The team is working hard to provide badger tenants with a safe new habitat while joining forces with a nearby school to recycle materials.
The remediation and clearance work is to make way for a new station at Moseley on the Camp Hill line boosting accessible transport options for commuters, goods and services and helping to lessen traffic pollution and congestion.
We’ve been working with an ecologist from Whitcher Wildlife to identify a safe and suitable location for a new badger sett not too far up the track and then we’ll create artificial tunnels for the badgers to find their new home without human intervention. We’ll monitor the move with the ecologist and once given the all clear we’ll install non-return gates and netting to protect the badgers from getting back into the area where the station will be built.
We’re preparing the landscape for the new station and as part of that we’ve had to remove some trees and vegetation, this will be compensated with planting elsewhere arranged by West Midlands Combined Authority.
However, the trees we’ve removed have been given a new lease of life by recycling several to a nearby school for their pupils to sit on in a wildlife garden that they’re building.
We’ve also delivered two grab wagons full of around ten tonnes of bark chippings that they’ll use for garden beds and sowing their own vegetables and a bunch of smaller branches for den building.
In addition, we’re planning to go back to the school to talk about the work that we’ve done to help protect the badgers while facilitating the opening of the new station.
The school is keen to get more involved with the project so we’re delivering a mixture of badger food so the pupils can mix the ingredients together to create badger food balls. We’ll then place these in the tunnels to attract the badgers to their new homes.
