Seal pups at St Abb’s Head

Transcript

My name is Ciaran Hatsell and I'm a ranger here for the National Trust for Scotland at St Abb’s Head National Nature Reserve.

In a seal colony it can be quite a sleepy scene but that is actually a really important part of their energy conservation. A nap can basically save a seal’s life.
The seals will feed between about 6 to 10 times a day, so you might see a bit of suckling. You'll see the mothers smelling the pups because the scent is a really important part of the bonding process.
Then what we get later in the season, after about two/two and a half weeks of feeding the pup, the females are ready to mate with. So we’ll get the bulls or what we call the beach-masters.
So they can have between 15 and 20 females and will try and defend as big a territory as they can.
It can be all action when the waves are smashing against the cliffs, the bulls are fighting on the beaches, the females are trying to defend their tiny pup.
Then after three weeks, the pups are completely independent.
In that time the female’s lost half her body weight. She's absolutely shattered. She goes back out to sea and the pup is completely independent.

Here at the reserve at the moment there's a couple of the beaches that run right alongside the path.
So what we've done in the last couple of years is put an electric fence up, basically just to keep seals and people separate.
Seals, although they look cute and cuddly, can be very dangerous animals and have got a really strong bacteria in the mouth.
If you get bitten you can be in serious trouble.
But we do daily patrols out in the reserve to check all the fences and make sure that seals aren't where they shouldn't be and basically keep them safe and provide a safe habitat for them to breed.

The mortality in a seal colony is really high, so it can be anything between 30 and 50%.
Now that can be really hard to watch but it's a really important part of the life on the colony.
It seems crazy that at this time of year they decide to have the pups when the weather is cold and there's lots of storms.
The reason behind that is in the summer they take advantage of the high fish stocks, so basically they feed and feed and feed and they get as fat as they can because at this time of year when they're feeding the pup they won't feed themselves at all.
So the females could lose about 4kg every single day and the pup will pile on about 2kg a day.
It's a beautiful example in nature of energy transfer - you see the female shrink and the pup swell.
By the time after three weeks the pups can be absolute blimps.
They've a really big thick layer of blubber and they just flop around the place like teenagers.
At this age we call them weaners, and sometimes we get groups of them and we call that a weaner pod.
That's not a term I’ve made up! That is a technical scientific term, I promise you.
The weaner pods basically hang around for a little while. They wonder why they're not getting fed and eventually they will find their way back to the sea and learn how to be a seal.

So one of the reasons I love St Abb’s and why it is such an incredible place is that we have this lovely seasonality about the place.
At all times of year you get huge bursts of life.
In the summer you've got the seabirds that completely take over with the sights and the sounds and the smells. And at this time of year, in the autumn, it becomes a thriving grey seal colony.
We don't just want to protect the nature but we want to share it with people as well.
So every Sunday I'll be out here between mid-November and mid-December. I'll be setting up with telescopes and binoculars so you can get really close-up views.
The action you can see in a grey seal colony is like no other.
It's as close as you can get to a nature documentary without actually watching one.
It’s live; it’s right in front of you; it is on your doorstep in Scotland.
So come out and see it -- it's absolutely incredible.