The chance to visit RSPB Frampton Marsh came along when a Pacific Golden Plover was found on Tuesday 20th July, as one of our number had never seen one before. This reserve has only been in existence since 2007 being situated on The Wash in Lincolnshire, 4 miles from Boston. It is surely one of the best places to see many of the wading birds returning from breeding in the Arctic/Greenland area. We decided to make an early start and with myself driving along with Bob K and Kevin C left Castleton at 6am. Heading along the M62, A1, A17 into Boston town centre then A16 and arriving at Frampton around 8-40am. As the tide was in we could see that there were lots of waders on the various pools feeding and roosting. We headed for the grassy fields along a small road that heads to The Wash and were soon watching the Pacific Golden Plover at about 60 yards distance, a fairly distinctive bird in very good plumage. It had a European Golden Plover with it so a really good size and structure comparison was made between the two of them.
We headed up onto the sea-wall and enjoyed an elevated look down onto the pools to see what we could find, we saw: - Dunlin, Black tailed & Bar tailed Godwits, Grey Plover, Oystercatcher, Avocet, Knot, Lapwing, Redshank, Greenshank in varying numbers. As we looked across the River Witham area a fellow birder told us that the place in the distance was the prison that had Jeffrey Archer as a resident! We continued our walk visiting all the hides around the reserve and managed to see: - Wood Sandpiper, Green Sandpiper, Spotted Redshank, Snipe, Curlew, Whimbrel, Common Sandpiper, Ringed & Little Ringed Plover. In all we managed to see 22 species of wading bird out of a total of 65 species. A solitary Marsh Harrier was the only bird of prey that we saw, this bird did manage to send lots of birds heading out onto the saltmarsh as the tide began to fall. Its always a real pleasure to visit this fairly new reserve to enjoy what it has to offer. We headed for home after a good days birding.
