Curley Wurleys

Dan Watson & I had planned a day out on bank holiday Monday (29/08), kind of hoping the weather would provide us with some good migrant conditions on the east coast. With a westerly wind and bright sunshine, it's fair to say conditions were far from ideal!

All the same we thought we give south Lincolnshire a bit of a go with at least the draw of plenty of waders at Frampton Marsh.

On a stunning day we started off early and headed straight for Gibraltar Point, a new site for me, but one Dan was pretty familiar with.

Although the site held few migrants, it was impressive in terms of the amount of good habitat, with some good areas for waders, plenty of scrub, dunes etc. Surely an exciting place to be during an easterly gale in October!

A good wander around the site produced a couple of Spoonbill on the scrape areas, a Whinchat, a Wheatear, tonnes of Sandwich Tern on the beach, a Spotted Redshank & Green Sandpiper, a couple of Marsh Harrier (including one in off the sea, over from Norfolk?), Lesser Whitethroat, a strong passage of Swallows south & several Yellow Wagtail.

We then made our way through the 'delightful' Skeggy and back south to finish our afternoon at the RSPB's Frampton Marsh, a cracking site for waders, particularly recently, with peak numbers of over 200 Curlew Sandpiper...proper mental!!

Curlew Sandpiper numbers today, while not anywhere near the 200, still built up to a hugely impressive 60+, far outnumbering anything I've seen before. Our afternoon was spent enjoying these, with numbers peaking at high-tide, at around 16:30pm.

Best of the rest were around 8 Little Stint, c.100 Ringed Plover (I counted 99, but I'm sure I must've missed 1 or 2!), Greenshank, juv LRP & decent numbers of Ruff & Black Tailed Godwits.

That concluded a decent enough day out with nothing stupendous but cool to try a couple of new sites and also to take a break from the attrition of midlands birding!