The birds, also known as peewits due to their call, are coming in to the Humber and the surrounding arable land from the continent and around the UK to feed.
Short said: “Along the estuary as a whole, because it’s not just Blacktoft, we’ve had good numbers, we’ve had them down at Reeds Island and down at Tetney.
“So you might be talking in anything of excess of 10,000 birds, if not more, maybe 12, 13,000 using the RSPB sites and then on the wider estuary, there might have been anything between 15 and 20,000 lapwings.”
The RSPB is a participant in the East Coast Wetlands Project which is working to maintain habitats for up to a million migrant waders and wildfowl that pass through that part of the UK annually.