There’s just a pig board between me and the lively grey seal barrelling towards me down the corridor. Tipping the scales at about 27kg, the pup – a young male called Bop It – already weighs as much as an eight-year-old child. This is more of an inside look into the workings of a seal hospital than I’d expected.
I’ve somehow found myself helping the team at the RSPCA’s Mallydams Wood Wildlife Centre in East Sussex to shepherd this lively grey seal down the corridor to be weighed. Bop It can’t be released back into the wild until he reaches 40kg (for females, it’s 35kg) as, in the wild, pups are around 45 to 50kg when they leave their mothers to fend for themselves. Yet the seals aren’t always as accommodating as Bop It on weigh-in day. Sometimes it takes a fish on a stick to lure the patient towards the scales, or a stretcher to carry them.
“They all have different personalities,” wildlife rehabilitator Sharna Richardson tells me as she shows me the facilities. “Sometimes they’re anxious and really defensive. Then they might be more likely to lash out and try to bite at the boards.”
Richardson introduces me to the residents: Risk, Hopscotch, Scrabble and Kiss Chase, to name a few. The names have a theme each season – currently, it’s games. During one rescue, “the seal was thrashing around in the cage as we were taking it up the beach,” says new staff member Jack McKenzie who had volunteered for a year before joining the team. Its name was obvious, he says. Helter Skelter.
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Grey vs common seals
There are 19 different seal species and two of these are found in the UK: grey (Halichoerus grypus) and common seals (Phoca vitulina), also known as harbour seals. How to tell the difference? Grey seals are much bigger. A fully grown adult male can reach up to 300kg, whereas common seals max out at about 150kg. You can also tell from the shape of the head. “The greys have longer faces,” says Richardson. Their scientific name roughly translates to ‘hook-nosed sea pig’. If you look at a seal straight on, you’ll also notice that grey seals have parallel nostrils while common seals have V-shaped ones.
Despite their name, there are fewer common seals in the UK than greys: around 30,000 and 120,000 respectively. Although the commons are, arguably, cuter, most of the staff admit that the feistier grey seals are their favourites. “They’ve got a bit of character to them,” says McKenzie, “even though they’re a bit more difficult.” More difficult to wrestle than docile common seals, he means. “They always put up a little bit of a fight,” adds Richardson.
Treating the seals
The treatment can be very hands-on, as I witness during my visit to Mallydams. Hopscotch needs an injection. One of the team leaps on to the seal’s back and wraps its head in a towel before it has the chance to whip around and land a nasty bite. This is the same method they would use to catch a seal that needs taking into the hospital or to control a patient that needs to be tube fed.
With Hopscotch under control, the vet quickly injects a routine dewormer into the lumbar area. The procedure is over in a moment. During the patients’ time at Mallydams, they will have three of these deworming injections 10 days apart “to get rid of the nasties”.
Grey seals are livelier so can be harder to handle, but the expert team here has had plenty of practice. However, even with all the steps they go through to “avoid any closeness with the bitey end”, as Richardson puts it, accidents do happen.
During her 10 years at Mallydams, Richardson has only been bitten once. “It was 100% my fault,” she says. They were treating a seal with a painful wound on the back of its neck from where it had become entangled in fishing gear. “The back of the neck is where we normally hold them. I felt so bad,” she says. “It must have been so sore, so I didn’t want to touch it.” Instead, she held the animal by the muzzle during the vet’s check-up. This was her mistake. The seal rolled around and bit her. “It was only a really slight pinch,” she says. All the same, she had to go on a course of antibiotics for four weeks. The bacteria in a seal’s teeth are no joke.
There’s a careful process for rescued seals: new patients come into arrival pens for treatment and to build up their strength. At this point, they’re often not able to eat fish. “They’ll start on an electrolyte solution which is just fluids,” says Richardson. “Then we give them fish soup, which is half electrolytes and half fish blended up with some vitamins.” From there, the pups are force-fed whole fish until they have regained their strength enough to eat fish themselves.
As they go through their treatment, they gradually work their way up from small to medium-sized pens then to a larger pool enclosure until they are finally ready to be released. “Some of them will take the fish from your hands but they get past that quite quickly,” she explains as we dropped fish into the biggest pool for the squabbling seals below. These pups have regained their strength and are waiting for their last worming jabs before they’re ready to be released. For enrichment, she also plops into the water a large ice block with fish frozen inside. “That’s just to keep their brains going.”
Mallydams, as you might expect, is full of smells. The fishy odour from the seal pens isn’t nearly as bad as the pungent smell of a fox, McKenzie tells me, although he’s already gone “a bit nose blind” to the seals. When we get home, I shower twice to make sure I’ve shaken off the lingering stench of fish.
It can also be noisy. One seal’s defensive vocalisation sounds like he’s hacking up a loogie, which is rather off-putting, even if not in the way he intended. Another seal makes a loud, gurgling growl like someone blowing bubbles in the bath. “She’s just telling you to stay away,” says Richardson. “She’s trying to make out like she’s big and bolshy even though she’s the littlest one at the moment.” Hungry young seals also cry out for food. “When the babies are in, they really yell,” says Richardson. “You can tell they’re asking for food, like how they call their mums on the beach.”
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Threats to seals
There are several reasons seals need rescuing: they might have a heavy parasite burden, an entanglement injury, a bite from a dog or another seal, or a pup might have become separated from its mum after a storm. The seals we meet during our visit have been treated for a variety of issues. Tiddlywink is being treated for an ulcerated eye, Skittles nearly died of pneumonia and Scrabble had a wound on her chest.
Helter Skelter came in with lungworm and a huge tapeworm; it’s not unusual for seals to have parasites. “If they’re eating fish, they’ll have worms,” says Richardson. The problem comes when they have another issue, in the same way it’s harder for us to fight off a cold when we’re run down. “Most seals can handle some level of parasite burden but if there’s something else going on that’s when it overwhelms them,” she says.
The pups vary in age but several of them are around a month old. Catan is even younger. “When she came in, she still had little tofts of the white fur,” says Richardson. “They lose that at around three weeks.”
All the seals I meet are making good progress. On average, it takes around three months of rehab until a pup is ready to be released. The pups are tagged before release so they can be identified if they’re spotted in the wild. Their unique markings also give identification clues.
Mallydams Wood: 60 years of rescues
Mallydams Wood has been a wildlife centre for around 60 years. The woodland was donated by local wildlife enthusiast Horace Quick who wanted it to be used in a way that would benefit wildlife. Since the centre was built more than 50 years ago, it has helped over 35,000 sick, injured and orphaned animals. Over time, it became a hub for seals and it now has custom-built pools to house pups going through rehabilitation. The centre takes in local seals from Kent and Sussex but sometimes helps hospitals further away if they don’t have space for a new animal.
Hospitals in other areas that don’t have suitable facilities will also send sick and injured seals to Mallydams for their recovery. In return, they might be able to help with other animals, such as deer (these can’t be kept at Mallydams because their pastures are too small). They don’t just help seals. Seabirds covered in oil, foxes and pigeons all come through their doors. Someone brought a monkey once. “He lured it in with a Custard Cream,” Richardson recalls.
The centre is entirely funded by RSPCA donations, although items donated by members of the public are welcomed. Towels, salt, cat and dog food are all useful. The wildlife rehabilitation team is made up of both staff and volunteers, usually with veterinary or animal management qualifications. Some, like Richardson and McKenzie, started volunteering before working their way up to a staff job. Others, like volunteer Rosie Murphy, already had hands-on seal handling experience. Murphy is a trained member of British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR).
Future challenges
Seals haul out to rest on land as part of their natural behaviour but there are a few signs an individual might need medical intervention: “If they seem to be breathing really fast or gasping for breath, if people can see obvious wounds or even if they’re really snotty or foamy,” says Richardson.
Seal populations in the UK are doing well, which helps keep our seas healthy. Some small-scale fishermen complain about the rebounding seal population, saying the animals steal their fish. And while that’s true to an extent – an opportunistic seal would absolutely pinch a fish or two – there’s a bigger threat wiping out their catch: industrial fishing vessels.
As apex predators, seals keep marine life populations in balance and it’s wonderful to see them pop their curious heads above the water. Seals could find it more difficult to survive as the climate changes, however, as warming waters could disrupt their feeding grounds and more frequent storms may put more pups at risk.
For the pups at Mallydams, whether they charge confidently straight into the waves or edge timidly out of the crate, they will soon be free. This moment is always a celebration for the wildlife rehab team. After months helping the baby recover, they get to see it where it belongs: in the wild on the UK coastline.
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Top image: rescued seal pups at Mallydams Wood. Credit: Anna McGrath
