Howdy folks, and welcome back to the Frampton Marsh recent sightings blog. It is time for another double helping of sightings from Poppy!
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Hello folks and welcome back to the latest sightings blog. Another slight bumper edition to give you a flavour of what’s been about recently. The weather has definitely started changing, plenty of wet weather over here, but that hasn’t affected numbers or sightings. So, with no further ado, I’ll crack on with a mini break-down of the sightings!
A brace of buntings about on Halloween ended up being eclipsed by the reserve’s first landward long-tailed duck at location 1. This was hanging around for a while but hasn’t been spotted since 9 November. Both snow bunting (location 2) and lapland bunting (location 3) about on the reserve at the start of the sighting’s week, but no further sightings since.
The bearded tits were around from 31 Oct - 6 Nov around the far end of the reedbed trail (location 4), in fact there were some pretty spectacular sights with six spotted on the third of the month.
The water rail continues to be a great spot, easily seen from the visitor centre. We also had 6 red crested pochard (location 5), still a relatively unusual visitor for Frampton.
Starlings and wigeon feeding over on the wet grasslands opposite the car park area (location 6). With lapwing and golden plover putting on some fantastic displays in a big swirly mass, often around location 7.
The ‘berry trail’ as marked on the map is always worth a look if you like your winter thrushes. With redwings making an appearance at location 8 on the ninth, who knows what will follow.
Our raptors appear to be out in full force with hen harrier (location 9), merlin (location 10) and peregrine (location 11) all spotted on 13 November. They seem to be continual spots for people this week in fact. Topping that off, we’ve also had appearances again from short-eared owls at location 12.
Wet weather has meant there’s not always been much about on the boards, but that is more down to the lack of people than birds. I’m sure there’s plenty more to be found out there, potentially some goodies to spot this weekend!
If you are coming to visit us, make sure to keep up to date with sightings by following our Twitter account. No need to have an account yourself, we make it so everyone can see it. If you do tweet yourself, please remember to use #RSPBFrampton so we can see what you are posting, and also ideally mention @RSPBNorfolkLinc. If you have any good photos (or video, or even artwork) we'd love to see that too. Tweet it, or share it on our Facebook page or our Flickr account. It may also be useful for you to know the weather and tide times for the site, which may well have an impact on what is showing.
Reedbed, freshwater scrapes, saltmarsh and wet meadow. Frampton Marsh has it all! Come and pay us a visit soon.