Howdy folks! Chris the visitor guy, once again here with your weekly round up of all that has been special around the reserve.
Two words for you.... curlew sandpiper!
Yes, we've had just one or two of these little beauts. But we'll get onto that... let's start with today and work backwards
Yes, 40+ curlew sandpipers. Sounds like a lot? You haven't seen anything yet....
The 'helice' clouded yellow was rather interesting. Clouded yellows are uncommon vagrants to the UK. About 10% of females have almost no yellow colour and look very much like a 'white'.
Right, so Thursday...
Wow! 100 curlew sandpipers. That's pretty good, isn't it? Er, hold your horses...
Still the 100+ curlew sandpipers, but a couple of thousand black-tailed godwits in too at high tide. The whinchats showed nicely..
(photo by Jack Dawson)
And have you ever wondered what timelapse footage of 100 curlew sandpiper looks like? No? Well, trust me, it is worth a look. Check out Jack's twitter feed...
https://twitter.com/UK_TeenBirder/status/768498953000222721
So, Tuesday...
Woah! Now we're talking. 200+ curlew sandpiper! That's more than anywhere we know of since the late 80's. You just don't get flocks like that any more. In fact, the high count was 258. Of which all but 3 were juveniles. Muist have been a really good breeding year up in the Arctic.
In addition to all that other good stuff, Josh Jones found a leucistic dunlin, which stood out a mile!
Almost pure white, but definitely not an albino as it still has dark eyes.
Also, some unconfirmed news of a male red-backed shrike, which was claimed from the hedgerow near to where the turtle doves are usually seen. No photo alas, but the description sounds good. Not been seen since though.
As you can see, Sarah was quite excited by all the curlew sandpipers on Sunday! :)
Aaaand there we go. That was the week that was.
For those of you interested in insects, belated news of our first lesser stag beetle, found (dead) at Freiston a week ago on Monday. We've waited until now to say because the Boston wildlife explorers had been having a meeting a couple of days before at which an entomologist had examples of beetles to show off, and we wanted to make sure it wasn't one he'd dropped!
For those of you who enjoy seeing what is in the moth trap, I'll be running it tonight and opening it up tomorrow morning when weather permits (it looks a bit dicey at my usual time of 10am). Probably won't run it over Saturday night as the weather looks to be wet. But since it is a Bank Holiday weekend i will run it over Sunday night and open up again on Monday morning, aiming again at 10am. So come see what lovely moths we have about!
If you want to get these maps and other sightings without waiting for the weekly blog posts, don't forget to watch our Twitter feed https://twitter.com/RSPBNorfolkLinc. You don't need to be on Twitter yourself, we've kept it so everyone can see what we are talking about.
So there you have it. Hope you all have a great weekend, stay safe and I'll see you all next week.
Reedbed, freshwater scrapes, saltmarsh and wet meadow. Frampton Marsh has it all! Come and pay us a visit soon.