Dr Euan Dunn MBE is an ecologist who lives in Nice Eversden close to Cambridge. For 25 years he led on creating marine conservation coverage for the RSPB and was awarded the Society’s medal in 2024. Not lengthy after retirement he turned his consideration from sea to land to help Cambridge Approaches – click on right here – a grassroots marketing campaign group towards constructing a model new part of East West Rail (EWR) between Bedford and Cambridge. Except EWR will be stopped in its tracks, it’s going to slice by means of the nature-rich countryside of South Cambridgeshire, fragmenting the panorama and inflicting irreparable injury on protected wildlife, together with the Barbastelle bat.
East West Rail: HS2’s Badly Behaved Little Brother
Simply up the hill from the place I reside in South Cambridgeshire lies Eversden and Wimpole Woods, a combination of historic coppice and excessive forest woodland first cited within the Domesday E-book. Within the weathered crevices of some tall mature timber, one of many UK’s rarest bats, the red-listed Barbastelle, finds haven for giving beginning to its pups in summer season. To preserve this valuable maternity roost, in 2003 the woodland was designated a Particular Space of Conservation (SAC), the best UK degree of website safety, and one in every of solely 5 English SACs designated for Barbastelles.
Some twenty years in the past, radio-tracking by the Cambridgeshire Bat Group confirmed that the extremely cell Barbastelle foraged so far as Grantchester, 10km from the SAC, however most flight paths converged on the micromoth-rich edges of the meandering Bourn Brook. For this wide-ranging bat, a radius of 6-7km from the maternity roost defines its Core Sustenance Zone (CSZ), a halo of habitat important to the resilience and conservation standing of the colony. The CSZ is ‘functionally linked’ to the SAC in that something that threatens the CSZ poses an equal hazard to the SAC itself. As such, the CSZ is accorded the identical degree of authorized safety because the SAC’s maternity roost.
Little marvel, then, that conservationists are up in arms concerning the resolution by Oxford-Cambridge East West Rail (EWR) to comply with a route slicing proper by means of the bats’ CSZ because the railway plunges by means of South Cambridgeshire in direction of the College metropolis. The potential impression on the maternity roost of this so-called ‘southern strategy to Cambridge’ (SATC) has just lately been assessed by Cambridgeshire County Council as ‘unacceptable’ and ‘catastrophic’, together with ‘within the worst-case situation, lack of the maternity roost.’
Within the map under ready by Cambridge Approaches, Eversden and Wimpole Woods SAC is proven darkish inexperienced within the centre of the 7km CSZ (ringed orange); from the north-west, EWR (gray line) crosses first Bourn Brook (blue) after which the River Rhee, a chalk stream, earlier than turning north in direction of Cambridge.
Simply because the builders of HS2 route planning ought to have identified about and averted bat-sensitive woodlands years earlier than they ploughed on, EWR has had years to provide you with a route that steered properly away from the Eversden and Wimpole Woods maternity roost and its CSZ. Furthermore, EWR has been extremely secretive about what it did know and when, so FOI requests had been required to power disclosure of the outcomes of two radio-tracking surveys carried out by EWR for Barbastelles caught and tagged in, respectively, the SAC (2020 survey) and outlying parcels of woodland (2022 survey), most of that are SSSIs.
In EWR’s 2022 survey, a beforehand unknown Barbastelle maternity roost was found in Hardwick Wooden SSSI (the darkish inexperienced sliver of woodland close to Highfields Caldecote on the prime of the map, above). The japanese fringe of Hardwick Wooden is just 700m from the closest proposed building compound for the railway, exposing the maternity roost to years of disruption (habitat loss, noise, gentle air pollution and many others), and its potential abandonment, properly earlier than a practice ever runs on the observe.
Within the 2022 survey report offered on FOI request, EWR completely redacted the mapped Figures exhibiting the calculated house ranges, core foraging areas and flight paths of the Barbastelles, on the grounds that placing them within the public area would breach the Environmental Data Laws (EIRs) and expose the bats to danger from ‘e.g. photographers, nature watchers, and even poachers’. Who stated irony was useless?
EWR’s failure to reveal the Barbastelles’ flight paths is especially egregious because it denies the chance for public scrutiny of the right alignment between these and EWR’s proposed mitigation measures within the form of bat crossings, i.e. inexperienced bridges and underpasses. That is vital as a result of, as EWR itself has conceded, key flight paths have to align exactly with crossing buildings to facilitate protected passage of the bats throughout the railway. Even with precise alignment, nevertheless, there is no such thing as a scientific proof that Barbastelles will even use inexperienced bridges and underpasses, no less than in ample numbers (> 90% of the Barbastelles is the effectiveness threshold advised from research of different bat species) to keep away from severing flight traces and collision danger with trains.
Though EWR is protecting stum concerning the flight paths its personal surveys have revealed, radio-tracking by the Cambridgeshire Bat Group had already indicated key Barbastelle flight paths (purple traces within the Cambridge Approaches map, under) from the maternity roost in Eversden and Wimpole Woods SAC. As talked about earlier, the strongest course of journey is NE in direction of the Bourn Brook hall which presents wealthy foraging circumstances. Flight traces cross the proposed EWR route (gray line) in a variety of locations, a few of which co-locate with EWR’s newest proposed mitigation measures (crimson dots), whether or not inexperienced bridges or underpasses. EWR says it plans to finesse such mitigation deployment with additional surveys.
However whereas crossing buildings might presumably present some mitigation for Barbastelles on the outrun from the maternity roost to forage, they’re unlikely to be efficient for return journeys. Research have proven that Barbastelles exiting at nightfall first comply with routine flight paths alongside hedgerows and tree traces for security from predators, particularly owls. Nonetheless, as soon as below the quilt of darkness, they fan out to forage and eventually fly instantly again to the roost. In different phrases, they cross the EWR route alignment on a broad entrance, which severely undermines the effectiveness of siting mitigation buildings at mounted places.
Recognising the particular significance of the Bourn Brook to the Barbastelles, EWR proposes to construct a viaduct over it to mitigate flight path severance. Nonetheless, from the viaduct south for 2km, the railway is deliberate to be embanked as much as a top of 11m (the so-called ‘Nice Wall of South Cambridgeshire’), including but extra jeopardy to the Barbastelles. Because the bats sometimes fly at heights of as much as 5m, surmounting this huge embankment – plus the added top of any overhead energy cables (railway catenary) and fencing for safety or noise abatement – creates a serious barrier impact and elevated collision danger. This menace is compounded by the excessive quantity of rail visitors proposed to function across the clock on EWR’s twin observe, with the prospect of freight trains over 750m lengthy working extra typically at night time to liberate the road by day for passenger trains.
Mortality danger aside, crossing such a excessive embankment is energy-sapping, particularly for closely pregnant females with decreased agility, and lactating females which can return to the maternity roost a number of occasions an evening. The embankment might show notably disorientating for naive juveniles, that are identified to vary as much as 7km from the colony, jeopardising their capability to search out the mitigation buildings supposed as protected crossing factors.
Like most bat species, the Barbastelle’s comparatively lengthy life-expectancy, low reproductive charge and prolonged post-natal care all add as much as a sluggish technology turnover, making colonies extremely susceptible to extreme mortality or breeding failure. The persistent EWR-related lack of only one or two grownup females a 12 months might subsequently pose an existential menace to the SAC’s Conservation Goal of sustaining the long-term inhabitants stability of the maternity roost.
The southern strategy to Cambridge, dictated by EWR’s obsession on connecting first to Cambridge Biomedical Campus as an unjustified crucible of development, flies within the face of the well-established ‘mitigation hierarchy’ wherein challenge proposals should prioritise avoidance over mitigation for limiting hostile impacts on biodiversity. In driving roughshod over this precept, simply as HS2 did, EWR rejected the inconvenient recommendation of Arup, its personal Technical Associate, that the choice path to Cambridge from the north was the higher choice on practically each metric, not least in being much less environmentally damaging and producing 43% much less embedded carbon.
EWR faces a transparent alternative: insist on a southern path to Cambridge that may trigger untold environmental injury or swallow their very own specialists’ suggestion to go for the northern route that’s cheaper, cleaner, and higher for bats and other people. To this finish, a Cambridge Approaches-initiated Parliamentary Petition https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/701546 is looking for the plans for Bedford-Cambridge part of EWR to be paused pending a full clear and impartial overview. Please do signal the petition and share it broadly.
In latest weeks, the political panorama has modified dramatically to deepen the jeopardy for South Cambridgeshire’s Barbastelles bats and the surroundings at massive, not only for EWR however for all infrastructure tasks. In her bid to spice up financial development, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has declared that builders needn’t fear about bats and newts, and that for EWR the Authorities wouldn’t countenance expensive mitigation measures because it did for the HS2 bat tunnel.
The Authorities then doubled down on its agenda to hole out infrastructure planning, together with its shamefully petty proposal that the requirement on Native Planning Authorities to contemplate the Bat Conservation Belief’s Bat Survey Pointers be eliminated solely from Pure England’s standing recommendation. As Pure England and the UK’s main voices on conservation have identified, the Authorities’s try and prioritise value over nature conservation is a false dichotomy, and a extremely harmful one at that. On this context EWR is rising as a defining take a look at case and one we can’t afford to lose.
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