Out on the sandbanks in the River Stour, one of the harbour seals is alternating between strange hopping movements and flopping down like a giant slug, Sharon Smith writes.
Neither Anna Cucknell from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) nor Stuart Barnes, the skipper of our boat, has seen such behaviour before.
“Very odd. It may just be having a good scratch,” says Barnes.
“It’s not giving birth, is it?” someone asks. Unlikely, says Cucknell. It would be a very late post-season birth — the seal pups here are already one month old.
As we watch, the seal finally stops wriggling and flicks itself into a banana shape.
Advertisement
“Good, it’s banana-ing, that means it’s healthy,” says Cucknell, 34, a conservation project manager at the ZSL. Not that members of the public see it that way. If they spot a
U-shaped seal on a sand bank they immediately assume it is in distress.
“Seals rest for up to 11 hours a day so it’s perfectly normal behaviour,” she says. Banana-ing is just the seal being practical and keeping its head and hind flippers dry, Barnes adds.
We are on a trip to see the harbour seals at Ramsgate, Kent, as part of the ZSL’s fifth annual seal survey in the Thames Estuary. The report takes a head count of harbour and grey seals and monitors threats. The data will contribute towards a marine mammal action plan for the estuary.
The survey is necessary because, although seals have been around for a long time in the UK — the writer Daniel Defoe recorded them in Ramsgate in the 18th century — the ZSL knows relatively little about them. The UK population is stable, but threats include developments encroaching on their habitat, and a killer disease called phocine distemper virus that decimated Europe’s harbour seals population in 1988 and 2002.
The virus is carried by grey seals and seems to have a 13 to 14-year germination period, which means it is overdue, Cucknell says. There is nothing the ZSL can do about the virus, so instead the society concentrates on other threats. These include inter-species warfare. “There’s competition for food and haul-out space. The grey seals kill the harbour seals and also turn on the pups of fellow greys,” she says. Protecting the seals’ habitat and food sources is one way to address the aggression.
Advertisement
The seals gazing at us with seemingly friendly eyes from puppy-dog faces come in several shades including orange. The discolouration is down to water pollution, but does not appear to have a detrimental effect on the seals, Cucknell says.
In the water a mother gives a piggy-back ride to her pup before suckling it while another pup glides closer to us for a better look. Graceful swimmers, the seals look ungainly as they lollop on land.
“Don’t let that fool you,” says Barnes. “They may look cumbersome, but they’re much faster than you think; they can outrun a dog any day of the week. Their bodies are very powerful and don’t forget that their claws are designed to rip open crustaceans.”
They also have a particularly nasty bite. “Their mouths are full of disease,” Cucknell says.
Nor is the antidote any fun.
Advertisement
“The antibiotics are given up your bottom,” says Barnes.
Seal-spotting is a popular line of work for Barnes, 45, who owns Go2Sea boat excursions and who also works for the coastguard. Today’s trip is taken in an Arctic 28 RIB, a former Special Boat Service vessel that Barnes bought from the Ministry of Defence as a stripped-down hull and has rebuilt.
“Unlike the Titanic it won’t sink, though I’ll not be serving any teas or coffees,” he says. He leans out into the driving rain and tugs at a long piece of string attached to a wiper blade. “It broke yesterday and I’m waiting for a new one. I feel like Fred Flintstone.”