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Another wintry outing to the coast

Posted on June 17, 2023 | Leave a comment

This time I went to Frampton Marshes on a cold winter day in February; when the sun was out it was lovely, when it clouded over and rained it was fierce! Frampton Marshes is on the edge of the flatlands in that part of Lincolnshire which captures every last breath of wind and when it’s blowing in from the east in February the weather can tend toward the arctic. Despite that, there was an awful lot of wildlife around and I took a lot of photo’s. And here is a selection of them to share what I saw:

***A male stonechat (Saxicola rubicola) perched on a bramble stem at the edge of the path***

And on the fringe of a bush on the other side of the path was the female:

Swans, ducks, geese and waders were on parade in large numbers both in terms of numbers of species and numbers of individuals. Unusually the birds I didn’t see any of on this trip were birds of prey. Sparrowhawk, kestrel, peregrine falcon, buzzard and marsh harrier could all have put in an appearance, especially as there was so much on the menu, but they were all conspicuous by their absence.

***A group of whooper swans (Cygnus cygnus) which had just made a spectacular landing (watering?) on the lagoon***

Whooper swans are smaller than our more common mute swans and have a yellow saddle on a shorter, more pointed, beak, so they’re fairly easy to tell apart. They fly in from Siberia to overwinter in the UK and disappear again in the springtime.

This goose has a very dark underside showing that it is from the Russian sub population which is what I would expect on the English east coast.

***An elegant male pintail (Anas acuta)***

The pintail is another primarily winter visitor to England in coastal areas and grazing marshes before heading north to Scottish, Icelandic and Scandinavian coasts to breed

***A ruff (Calidris pugnax) – this won’t be the best photo you’ll ever see of a ruff, but it’s the first time I’d photographed one so it had to included***

***A flock of black tailed godwit (Limosa limosa) flying in formation***

There are two species of godwit found in the UK, the bar tailed, and the black tailed. These ones are black tailed and can easily be distinguished in flight by the distinct eponymous black end to its tail. And also as its name suggests the black tail is replaced by grey and white bars in the bar tailed version.

***Avocet (Recurvirostra avosetta) taking to the air en masse possibly spooked by an invisible bird of prey***

I read recently that someone has proposed a plan to build a tidal barrier across the Wash between north Norfolk and south Lincolnshire. This area, with its huge areas of tidal mudflats that provide feeding and shelter to hundreds of thousands of overwintering birds, is of true global significance, so I fervently hope that any interference doesn’t happen as it’s hard to imagine it would be anything other than catastrophic for already dwindling bird numbers. FIngers crossed!

But at the moment it’s a vast magical space and is home to vast numbers of all kinds of water birds and the predators that rely on them, and a great day was had in their company!

All those flocking waders

Posted on November 26, 2011 | 2 comments

The Cambridgeshire Fens can be a bleak and windswept part of the world as the winter months descend, and today it was very bleak and very windswept, but it’s a great location for getting out and seeing some exciting and scarce wildlife.

A small flock of lapwing and golden plover over Burwell Fen

For those of you who don’t know the Fens they’re characterised by wide open flatness and big skies. They were originally under water but were drained by Dutch engineers in the 17th and 18th centuries to leave high quality arable land. The soil is extremely rich in organic material which gives the soil the rich black colour evident in the picture above.

I set off there on Saturday with my friend David because there had been a report on the Cambridge Bird Club website of short eared owls (Asio flammeus, Dansk: mosehornugle) in the vicinity. After wending our way through Swaffham Prior and Reach we rocked up at Tubney Fen where we sat in a new National Trust hide overlooking a new pond with new reed beds which had four coots (Aythya fuligula, Dansk: blishøne) and a pair of mute swans (Cygnus olor, Dansk: knopsvane) paddling on it. And no other signs of life whatsoever.

As we watched, the mute swans took off and looped round low right in front of us and landed back on the water. At least one of them landed on the water in the spectacular and graceful way that mute swans do. The other one crash landed on the ground just short of the water and after regaining its equilibrium stood looking highly indignant but managed to retain it’s dignity in a way that only a mute swan could in those circumstances. We hoped it wasn’t injured but it looked to be suffering from little more than damaged pride.

After another five minutes sat in the hide the lack of further activity and the low temperature caused us to move on, and on the way back to the car we spotted eight whooper swans in a field several hundred meters away. The whooper (Cygnus cygnus, Dansk: sangsvane) is a winter migrant to the UK and a very scarce breeder, usually less than ten pairs a year will breed here. It’s a similar size to the mute swan but it’s neck is straighter and the beak is straight with a black tip and pale yellow base. Their breeding territory is in the high Arctic and they migrate south as far as Africa for the winter.

A family unit of eight whooper swans – two adults with white plumage and the charateristic yellow beak and six cygnets with pale grey/white plumage and without the yellow beak

We decided to move on to Burwell Fen from Tubney Fen and on the way we were considerably closer to the swans so we stopped for another look. And as we looked David noticed that a pale brown stripe in an adjacent field was in fact a flock of golden plovers (Pluvialis apricaria, Dansk: hjejle) and lapwings (Vanellus vanellus, Dansk: vibe). When I was a kid I spent a fair amount of time out and about exploring the countryside and huge flocks of lapwing consisting of hundreds and possibly thousands of birds were a fairly common sight. But their numbers have been dwindling for decades and these days I’m pleased if I see more than twenty. A carrion crow was getting agitated in the tree beyond the plovers because a buzzard (Buteo buteo, Dansk: musvåge) was perched there too, but the crow wouldn’t get too close and the buzzard just sat tight and ignored it. There turned out to be 243 lapwing in this flock and for me that alone justified the trip.

Around 10% of the lapwing in our flock of 243

There were also several hundred golden plover. As we watched another even bigger flock joined them and when they were flushed into the air we could see another flock as big again in the middle distance and beyond that another that was enormous. So we estimated that between these flocks there were several thousand birds. It was a amazing sight.

The flocks of waders eventually settled so we made off further into the Fen, pausing to gaze at a group of roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) relaxing in a field:

These very well camouflaged roe deer didn’t seem at all perturbed by our presence

As we watched the deer, a sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus, Dansk: spurvehøg) quartered the field and then a peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus, Dansk: vandrefalk) swooped past car, travelling with the customary haste that species is renowned for.

Arriving eventually at a car park, we continued on foot over a bridge where several kestrels (Falco tinnunculus, Dansk: tårnfalk) were quartering all the fields around and almost immediately spotted a short eared owl. It was perched on a fence post in the middle of the adjacent field and I initially mistook it for a little owl because I was looking at it from front-on and I could only see the top half, but when we saw it through David’s spotting scope we could clearly see it was of the short eared variety.

Short eared owl hunting rodents the easy way, not wasting any energy

As a result of the inclement weather, low light and strong wind, and only having a 300mm lens I couldn’t get any good photographs, but it’s unmistakeably a short eared owl, so I’m happy.

We saw various small songbirds such as chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs, Dansk: bogfinke) and goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis, Dansk: stillits), five bird of prey species, whooper swans, and countless thousands of golden plover and lapwing. So despite the cold it was fine way to spend a Saturday morning.