BATS are among the species which stand to gain from the reopening of the Rother Valley Railway (RVR).
Work on surveying bats began in August 2023. “We’ve carried out bat transect surveys once a month,” explained Giles Coe, RVR’s environmental expert.
“We’ve accompanied that with activity surveys for bats for which we’ve set out static monitors approximately every 500 metres along the route of the line. Those are left to record for five nights. We then investigate the data to see what bats are there and roughly what kind of abundance.”
Giles said that sections of the trackbed are currently covered by densely thatched secondary woodland. He added: “While some species are able to move through that quite easily, groups such as bats will find that extremely difficult. We anticipate that once that is opened up, the railway will provide a far more functional corridor for bats to move across the landscape.”
Surveys of dormice, another protected species, has also been underway. “We’ve been sample surveying all the suitable woody habitats along the route of the railway,” said Giles. “It involves us setting out little tubes every 15 metres in which the dormouse can nest in suitable vegetation. We check them each month through the year.
