Blair Castle Bats

Working with Jonathan Gotelee Architects on behalf of Blair Castle Estate Ltd, David Dowse provided expert survey and advice in the re-roofing of the Great Drawing Room roof, home to a large maternity colony of brown long-eared bats.

Under licence from SNH, works included pre-work monitoring of hibernating bats over the winter, followed by temporarily excluding and translocating the maternity roost to an adjacent roof space. New roost accesses were created during the re-roofing process and mitigation success was confirmed during subsequent monitoring surveys carried out the following summer: the maternity colony having returned to their favoured locations within the Great Drawing Room roof.