It was with some trepidation that I set out yesterday for our first grey seal pup monitoring round post Storm Francis. It is still fairly early days in the season but 3 days previously there had been 17 pups on our monitored beaches. With 16m wave heights and 60mph winds recorded locally the swells had been fierce, as illustrated in the last couple of blogs. Surely nothing could survive that? In recent years autumn storms have taken a heavy toll on our seal pups so what I found was quite unexpected.
There had been certainly been some losses but nowhere near as many as feared and overall the total number of pups had actually increased from 17 to 21 and all appeared to be with a cow or have one in the near vicinity, i.e. they had managed to stay together. Some of these were new born on the day of the count but that still means heavily pregnant cows had managed to ride out the storm swells.
The tenacity of these animals never fails to amaze me and while I'm sure they will face more storms this autumn and not all outcomes will be as positive, for now it is an encouraging end to a rough week if you were a seal pup.
A well earned feed after hours spent riding out the storm (click on photo to see at full res)
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