Seasons by the Sea | Grey Seals at Blakeney Point (Classic)

Experience life on Blakeney Point in Norfolk as it transforms throughout the year, in this classic episode. 

From the mass arrival of seal pups in winter to the noisy feathered-frenzy of summer, discover how a remote stretch of shingle coastline is home to some of the UK's most unique marine wildlife.

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Production
Host and Producer: Michelle Douglass
Sound editor: Jesus Gomez

Discover more
Please follow our seal-spotting guidance
nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/nature/wildlife/seal-spotting-guidance 

Find out more about visiting Blakeney National Nature Reserve
nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/norfolk/blakeney-national-nature-reserve 

Read about the Sea Mammal Research Unit’s work
www.smru.st-andrews.ac.uk
 
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Episode Transcript

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (00:39):
Hello, happy new year and welcome to the
National Trust Podcast. I'mMichelle Douglass. Before we get
on with the story, I quicklywanted to share with you that in
March this year, the NationalTrust Podcast will be changing
so we can bring you moreimmersive tales in nature,
history and adventure.
This strand will become ournature podcast, The Wild World

(01:01):
Of... And look out for our newhistory podcast, Back When.
Remember to follow either showin your favourite podcast app to
be the first to hear new storieswhen they arrive.
Now, on with today's podcast. Inthis favourite episode, we're
travelling to Blakeney Point onEngland's east coast to discover
how this seemingly inhospitableshingle spit is home to one of

(01:25):
the UK's biggest and fluffiestnatural phenomena every winter.
We'll be following BlakeneyNature Reserve through every
season to uncover the spectaclesand secrets of life on this
rugged landscape.
Be prepared, this is nature atits fullest, so at times things
get a little bit gritty.

(01:54):
Every year in deepest darkestwinter, this flat, unassuming
pebble shoreline becomes thestage for one of the UK's
greatest shows. Visitors peerfrom ferries to catch a glimpse
of the scene, phones held highand cameras clicking to capture
the action unfolding on thebeach. The coastline is packed

(02:14):
with around 4,000 plump,white-coated, impossibly fluffy
seal pups.
It's grey seal pupping seasonand Blakeney Point in Norfolk is
one of the world's mostimportant sites for the
charismatic marine mammals.
But what most people don't getto see is the story behind this

(02:37):
spectacle each winter.
Blakeney National Nature Reserveis not only part of a designated
Area of Outstanding NaturalBeauty, but a remarkable
conservation success story. Andthe best way to discover what
makes this place so unique is tojourney through a year on this
remote stretch of coast throughthe eyes of the people who look

(02:57):
after, work and even live outhere through the changing
seasons.
This story really starts on acold February day. I'm in a Land
Rover with Ranger Duncan Halpin,and I'm feeling a little nervous
about the essential but grislyjob we're here to do.

DUNCAN HALPIN (03:19):
We're driving along Blakeney Point. There's
about three miles of shinglestretching out in front of us.
Salt marsh gleaming an almostgolden colour in the low
sunlight. And then the NorthSea, which is looking almost
temptingly blue.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (03:36):
Duncan pulls up the Land Rover and attaches a
trailer to the back. We're metby a hardy band of rangers and
volunteers here to help with thetask. The kit we'll need for the
job is handed around the group.It's pretty basic. A pair of
gloves and some thick black binliners. Then we set off.

(03:56):
We've come a little bit back,past the dunes to the marshes.

DUNCAN HALPIN (04:00):
There's a great example of why we're doing it
just up here.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (04:02):
The annual seal carcass clear-up is vital
conservation work here atBlakeney. Sadly, not all the
seal pups born during puppingseason will make it beyond the
first few crucial weeks of life.

DUNCAN HALPIN (04:15):
A very ripe carcass in front of us, let's
say, and you can actually seeall the little rat prints coming
down from the burrow and thenround the carcass. So the rats
in that burrow have just beenfeeding on this carcass, so
they'll just be able tomultiply.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (04:31):
If the carcasses were left here, they'd
provide food for the ratpopulation to grow. And too many
rats could threaten the hugecolony of terns that in a few
months will also use Blakeney astheir breeding grounds, since
rats will eat bird eggs and evenchicks. So this grim task of
removing the seal carcasses isactually clearing the way for

(04:52):
new wildlife to thrive here.
They've got a good chance ofsurvival, but sadly this one
didn't quite make it.

DUNCAN HALPIN (04:59):
Yeah, absolutely. Part and parcel of the of nature
if you like. During the poppingthe mortality here runs at
something like five percentwhich is quite low really.
Places I've worked in the pastlike the Farne Islands, some
years the mortality for pupsthere can be up to 40 percent.
Majority here will go on to livehappy, healthy seal lives.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (05:22):
Blakeney Point's abundance of space and
food makes it a palatial andpopular pupping site. Grey seals
spend most of their lives at seabut during breeding season they
come ashore for a dramatic andintense life cycle played out in
a few short weeks, as Dr DebbieRussell, deputy director of the
Sea Mammal Research Unit at StAndrews University, explains.

DEBBIE RUSSELL (05:46):
Grey seals, they pup in autumn and winter. The
females give birth to a singlewhite-coated pup. We call it
lanugo, the coat. The femaleslose over a third of their body
weight, giving the pup the milk.So after weaning, the females
come into oestrus, which meansthey're ready to mate with a
male.
Male seals, which we call bulls,have a group of females that

(06:07):
they will try and mate with.There may be kind of one big
male, one beach master thattries to basically control the
access to any of these females.You can often identify the kind
of older males by the scars thatthey have. The pups are left on
the colony alone.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (06:24):
First seal down and starting to push any
squeamishness aside, I team upwith a fellow newbie to scour
the beach for more carcasses.

SUE GREGORY (06:32):
Hello, my name's Sue. I'm a volunteer. I'm really
interested in seals, so to beable to come out, actually be
with like-minded people who alsolove seals, and be able to talk
seals is really, really good.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (06:49):
In fact, if you're a seal superfan like Sue,
the clear-up even offers anintriguing lesson in anatomy.

SUE GREGORY (06:57):
Oh here's my first dead seal, there's not much of
it left and there's some nicebones. Is that the scapula? The
shoulder bone, that's thehumerus, so that's the long
upper arm bone.
Oh dear it's smelly. There weare.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (07:16):
The team spends the next few hours
spreading out and sweeping thebeach.
Found another one.
The clear up is physically hardwork. Picking up carcasses and
heaving the heavy bags over thesand dunes to the trailer. And
then doing it all again andagain until finally Operation
Seal Clear-Ups complete.

CHRIS BIELBY (07:42):
Pretty much the last of a grizzly hole.
Shattered now. I'm Chris Bielby,I'm the Countryside Manager for
the Norfolk Coast and Broads.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (07:50):
And now what happens?

CHRIS BIELBY (07:51):
So they will be taken back to our yard at Friary
Farm in Blakeney, and we have aspecialist contractor who's
brought a skip, and they willthen go in the skip with a
special lid put on top, and thenthey will take them away and
dispose of them suitably.
You'd think that doing this job,the atmosphere would be really
sombre, but actually everybody'sbeen fairly upbeat. When the
tern colony arises, it'll be soimportant. Really pleased to get

(08:13):
that done.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (08:15):
After the beach clean-up, Blakeney Point
stays relatively quiet for therest of winter. Then, as the
freezing weather melts away inthe sunshine, this coastal and
salt marsh habitat bursts intolife. Spring has arrived, and
rangers and volunteers begin toprepare for the next big natural
spectacle of the year. Butbefore things get busy, there's

(08:37):
still time for the Blakeney teamto enjoy the season at a more
relaxed pace.
If you're an inlander... At thistime of year you might get out
and about hiking or biking tosee the natural world in full
bloom. But if you live along theNorth Norfolk coast like
National Trust volunteer SueGregory, you might prefer to

(09:00):
take a different mode oftransport altogether for a
nature safari with a uniqueperspective.

SUE GREGORY (09:06):
This morning I'm going to record some of the
sounds and describe some of thesights as I go kayaking in the
harbour at Blakeney.
It's middle of May. It's justsuch a lovely morning.
Coming north, I can see the oldlifeboat house on Blakeney
Point, that iconic bluebuilding. We have the entrance

(09:29):
to the Clyde Channel, and thenjust looking round, the East
hills and the pines.
I've now just kayaked across tothe Blakeney Point, and I'm just
sitting very quietly over somemarsh which is flooded and I'm
now starting to see birds.

(09:54):
I've just had a flock of oystercatchers fly over the top of me.
There were a couple of gullsthat were obviously stalking
their nests. And they've justseen them off.
Other birds I've heard were acurlew, and this is an area
where it's quite good to seespoonbills.

(10:17):
Just had a little tern go rightin beside me and pull out a
little sand eel, and it's stillmanaging to squeak with its food
in its beak. It's just so niceto sit and float. But I'll have
to put in some effort and thenI'll go home for breakfast.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (10:39):
Over the next few months, the number of
ground-nesting migrant seabirds,terns, arriving at this globally
important site to breed, keepsgrowing.
It's summer on Blakeney Point.And by now, from shoreline to
dune, this baby boom beach is afrenzy of noisy, feisty families

(10:59):
of the feathered variety. Allthis action on the beach
requires 24-hour conservationcare, such as patrols to keep
away predators, populationcounts and informing the public.
So Ranger Duncan Halpin leavesall his home comforts to head
off-grid, moving into an old,blue, corrugated metal lifeboat
house where he and two assistantrangers spend eight months of

(11:21):
the year hanging out with somevery rowdy neighbours.

DUNCAN HALPIN (11:25):
My favourite part of the job is probably living on
the Point over summer, beingliterally stuck amongst the
wildlife. That's an incrediblyrewarding experience. Summer on
the Point is an amazing time.There's again huge
concentrations of life and ariot of noise.
We have up to three, fourthousand sandwich terns nesting.

(11:49):
They have a really, reallydistinctive call which it really
is the sound of summer on thisbit of coastline.
Little terns are one of the UK'srarest seabirds. They're the
smallest tern in the UK and theymake this almost squeaky, I
think it's a bit like a squeakydog toy, call as they fly over.
We do get the occasional ArcticTern. The Arctic Tern has the

(12:12):
longest known migration of anyanimal. At the northern reaches
of their limit, they willeffectively fly Pole to Pole
every single year.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (12:20):
Other sights of summer at Blakeney include an
abundance of colourful coastalbutterflies. And splash in the
right puddle on an evening andyou might see the sea spa with
blue bioluminescence.
As the long days of summer drawto an end, the landscape changes
again. The thousands of ternstake off from their breeding

(12:40):
grounds to head to warmerclimes, forming part of the
great late summer migration inUK skies.
As colder weather creeps intothe freshwater marshes, eels
begin their epic and mysterious4,000 mile migration back to the
Sargasso Sea, where they breed asingle time before they die. And
rangers have migrated from theremote lifeboat house to the

(13:03):
familiar comforts of theBlakeney ranger hut. Autumn is
here, and the coastline flauntsa seasonal look all of its own.

DUNCAN HALPIN (13:14):
There are definitely seasons on the Point,
but they're different to, well,what I call the mainland.
There's no trees, you know,turning into autumn colours. The
greens on the salt marsh fromplants like samphire and sea
purslane and shrubby sea blight,they all start to change in late
summer into the traditionalautumn colours the oranges the

(13:35):
bronzy colours and the saltmarsh just takes on a completely
different hue, which when thelight's shining on it just has
this golden edge to it. There'sa nervous anticipation in late
October waiting for the firstseal pup.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (13:54):
It's winter, mid-December. The UK's in the
grip of a deep freeze. But theicy expanse of coastline and low
winter sun in Norfolk's big openskies look beautiful. And I'm
just arriving at the Blakeneyranger hut for an event I've
been looking forward towitnessing for myself all year.
Duncan, hello. Lovely to see youagain.

DUNCAN HALPIN (14:15):
Hello there. Last time you were here, we were
doing the seal clear up, butlet's go see the spectacle.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (14:30):
We've just got out the jeep. As we've been
approaching today, at first itwas little velvety heads of
seals popping up from the wavesand then the further that we got
towards the colonies it wasthese huge bulls.
And then we started seeing thebabies, little white furs with
their huge eyes. And now we'vereached a denser part of the

(14:50):
colony and we're going to lookat how Duncan conserves and tags
these seals to help them and tohelp the spectacle keep
happening every year.
What's going on now, Duncan?

DUNCAN HALPIN (15:03):
What we're going to do is we're going to try and
spray some pups with some markerspray. It'll come out when they
moult, but it'll allow us totrack that pup up to when it
does start to moult. We'retrying to get good data for the
Sea Mammal Research Unit.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (15:17):
The rangers on the ground work like spraying
the pups with paint to identifythem, all feeds into a big study
monitoring the health of the UKseal population, as Dr Debbie
Russell from the Sea MammalResearch Unit explains.

DEBBIE RUSSELL (15:32):
Blakeney actually used to be a very small
colony. 20 years ago, there wasless than 100 grey seal pups
born at Blakeney. And now it'slikely there's about 5,000 pups
born at Blakeney.
It used to be that the number ofseals that were born was
estimated through ground counts,but the size of the colony
essentially prohibits that. Soour work now is to do so by

(15:54):
aerial survey. There's anaeroplane with the hole in the
floor where there's two cameras.
And as they go over the colony,they're taking multiple pictures
and we stitch them together andcount the pups that are on them.
Grey seals have historicallybeen hunted at very high levels.
There has also been times wheregray seals have been culled as a

(16:14):
result of potential interactionswith fisheries.
So there was a much reducedpopulation, which is now kind of
recovering and potentiallyexpanding beyond what it would
have been. So the UK probablyhas about 36% of the world's
grey seal population. And inEurope, the UK has the vast
majority of grey seals. So itreally is an incredibly

(16:37):
important area for grey seals.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (16:43):
Going up and tagging pups on the bottom isn't
the easiest conservation task.

DUNCAN HALPIN (16:50):
It's a difficult job to get close to the pups,
the mums are very defensive andthen you add in the bulls that
are on the beach. It's all abouthaving a look, seeing what the
situation is and then getting itdone as quickly as possible to
avoid disturbance and avoid thepossibility of getting bitten as
well.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (17:07):
So what kit do we have to do this
conservation work?

DUNCAN HALPIN (17:12):
We've got a bag of marker spray here and a
healthy can-do attitude.
Going to mark this pot with ablue and yellow Mark. Hopefully
it doesn't run away.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (17:34):
Almost ballet-like, Duncan quickly nips
in and out to spray the babies,but the super protective mums
move surprisingly quickly, their24 stone or 155 kilogram bulks
lunging towards the imposter,teeth bared.
After Duncan's done thisdelicate dance about a dozen
more times, enough pups havebeen tagged for the day.

DUNCAN HALPIN (17:57):
It's not a disturbance-free procedure, but
the study zone's a very smallpart of the colony, so the
benefits sort of outweigh thenegatives. We've managed to
spray a few seals, so we can goaway and leave them in peace
now.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (18:13):
I've just left Duncan and I'm off to meet
two of the volunteers who'vebeen looking after Blakeney for
the whole year. Looking beyondthe seals, I can see two figures
and that must be Hanne and Sue.Hi! Hello!

HANNE SIEBERS (18:29):
Hello, Michelle!

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (18:30):
How does it feel being back here?

SUE GREGORY (18:33):
Oh, it's absolutely fantastic. The seal colony, in
my opinion, has expanded thisyear. I'm not quite sure whether
we're at the peak at the moment,but I suspect we may be.

HANNE SIEBERS (18:43):
Hello, I'm Hanne Siebers. I've been volunteering
with the National Trust for fiveyears. I go out here as often as
I can. I find it uplifting,healing, and I have absolutely
no need for going away onholiday. Best of all, I am

(19:05):
National Trust propertyphotographer.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (19:08):
So can you give us some of your top tips?

HANNE SIEBERS (19:11):
If you want to photograph seals, you have the
rules like for any wildlife.Nature comes first. It is, of
course, different because I amprivileged. I am right in the
middle of the rookery with along lens. I can zoom in.

(19:32):
I try to capture a seal notlooking directly into my lens.
We have now two pups here. Theyhave just been sprayed, one
yellow, one gold, with a bull.Guarding his territory and the
cow next to the pups. I have anice backdrop with the roaring

(19:56):
sea. I get down on my knees tobe on the same level as the
seals.
I use my long lens and a wideaperture. I get that shot now.
And this is really BlakeneyPoint for me.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (20:18):
A beautiful but freezing day on Blakeney
Point. Might be time to headback for a cup of tea now.
When we started with the clearup at the start of the year, it
was a little bit sad, a littlebit gritty. But coming back and
seeing just as far as the eyecan see, fat, healthy, gorgeous

(20:41):
seals, doing their thing,expanding their colony, it just
goes to show what conservationcan do somewhere like Blakeney.

DUNCAN HALPIN (20:48):
It's a real success story here. Seeing so
many seals and the numbers goingup year on year, it's a great
reward for the work we do.Having such a massive
concentration of life in what isquite a small space is just
astounding.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS (21:11):
Thanks for listening to this episode of the
National Trust Podcast. I hopeyou've been inspired by this
programme. And please rememberto follow our guidelines for the
best and safest ways to enjoythe seals and other wildlife at
Blakeney Point, including how toresponsibly photograph seals.
For more information, follow thelinks in this episode's show

(21:33):
notes. And don't forget tofollow and review us on your
favourite podcast app or head tonationaltrust.org.uk/podcasts to
browse our full back catalogue.Until next time, goodbye.