Frampton Marsh

Day 275 #365DaysWild

Amongst the dark clouds of biodiversity loss there remain shining lights.

Over to the corner of Lincolnshire to the RSPB Frampton Marsh reserve.

To get there you travel through a barren landscape of glyphosated fields. Intensification of farming is a key factor in the current wildlife crisis that has been termed ‘the sixth mass extinction’ by the WWF. A local intensive poultry unit cast an olfactory shadow over us throughout our visit. 

There, beneath towering skies, using vision, creativity and imagination, the RSPB has created the kind of place so packed with birds that it is reminiscent of such places you’d find abroad.

Arrive to a raucous chorus of black-headed gulls.  

And there’s a slender animated gem of a bird to greet you that is underwhelmingly called a lesser yellowlegs. This trim beauty has travelled across the Atlantic to reside at Frampton. A real delight. Confiding too. None of this hiding in some distant corner. Only metres from the car park. Worth the journey itself.

Across the entire reserve the movement and noise fills the senses.

Long-billed black-tailed godwits are turning a rusty plum colour in anticipation of the move to their breeding grounds.

In glorious breeding plumage too were golden plover, now many with black bellies and faces to contrast with their breeding uniform of laced gold.

So many more treasures as we counted over fifty species of bird.

But amongst it all, there was one crowning moment that will remain until my memory dims.

The reserve is separated from vast, grassy salt marshes of the Wash by a raised, grassed bank.

We watched perhaps a thousand dark-bellied Brent geese grazing on the marsh. Dark-bellied Brent breed on the Arctic coasts of central and western Siberia and winter in western Europe, with over half the population in England. Their migratory return journey will begin in days or weeks..

And then, as we watched, at an unseen command they rose and in a cacophony of calls flew low over us in a low black cloud to settle on the reserve. 

Only nature can deliver such emotional hammer blows.

Congratulations RSPB Frampton Marsh.