MICHELLE DOUGLASS: Hello and welcome to the National Trust
podcast. I'm Michelle Douglass podcast producer and wildlife
enthusiast at the National Trust. Today, we're traveling to
Blakeney Point on England's East Coast to discover how a
seemingly inhospitable four mile shingle spit is famous for one
of the UK's biggest and fluffiest natural phenomenons
every winter.
But in this special episode, we're following Blakeney
National Nature Reserve through every season to uncover the
sights, spectacles and secrets of life on this rugged and
unique landscape.
And just as a heads up, this is nature at its fullest, so at
times things get a little bit gritty.
Every year in deepest darkest winter, this flat unassuming
pebble shoreline becomes the stage for one of the UK's
greatest shows.
Visitors peer from ferries to catch a glimpse of the scene.
Phones held high and cameras clicking to capture the action
unfolding on the beach.
The coastline is packed with around 4000 plump, white coated,
impossibly fluffy, seal pups.
It's Grey Seal pupping season. And Blakeney Point in Norfolk is
one of the world's most important sites for the
Charismatic marine mammals.
But what most people don't get to see is the story behind this
spectacle each winter.
Blakeney National Nature Reserve is not only part of a designated
area of outstanding natural beauty, but a remarkable
conservation success story.
And the best way to discover what makes this place so unique
is to journey through a year on this remote stretch of coast
through the eyes of the people who look after work and even
live out here through the changing seasons.
This story really starts on a cold February day.
I'm in a land rover with ranger Duncan Halpin and I'm feeling a
little nervous about the essential but grisly job we're
here to do.
DUNCAN HALPIN: We're driving along Blakeney Point. There's
about three miles of shingle stretching out in front of us,
salt marsh gleaming an almost golden colour in the low
sunlight and then the North Sea, which is looking almost
temptingly blue.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: Duncan pulls up the land rover and attaches a
trailer to the back. We're met by a hardy band of rangers and
volunteers here to help with the task.
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 bin liners.
Then we set off.
We've come a little bit back past the dunes to the marshes.
DUNCAN HALPIN: There is a great example of why we doing it just
up here.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: The annual seal carcass clear up is vital
conservation work here at Blakeney. Sadly, not all the
seal pups born during pupping season will make it beyond the
first few crucial weeks of life.
DUNCAN HALPIN: A very... ripe carcass in front of us, let's
say, and you can actually see all the little rat prints coming
down from the burrow and then around the carcass. So the rats
in that borough have just been feeding on this carcass. So
they'll just be able to multiply.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: If the carcasses were left here, they'd
provide food for the rat population to grow. And too many
rats could threaten the huge colony of Terns that in a few
months will also use Blakeney as their breeding grounds since
rats will eat bird eggs and even chicks.
So this grim task of removing the seal carcasses is actually
clearing the way for new wildlife to thrive here.
They've got a good chance of survival, but sadly, this one
didn't quite make it.
DUNCAN HALPIN: Yeah, absolutely. That's just part and parcel of
nature if you like.
During the pupping, the mortality here runs at something
like 5% which is quite low really.
Places I've worked in the past like the Farne Islands, some
years the mortality for pups there can be up to 40%. The
majority here will go on to live happy, healthy seal lives.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: Blakeney Point's abundance of space and
food makes it a palatial and popular pupping site.
Grey Seals spend most of their lives at sea, but during
breeding season, they come ashore for a dramatic and
intense life cycle played out in a few short weeks as Dr. Debbie
Russell, Deputy Director of the Sea Mammal Research Unit at
Saint Andrews University explains.
DR DEBBIE RUSSELL: Grey Seals they pup in autumn and winter.
The females give birth to a single white coated pup. We call
it lanugo the coat.
The females lose over a third of their body weight, giving the
pup the milk.
So after weaning the females come into estrous, which means
they're ready to mate with a male.
Male seals, which we call bulls have a group of females that
they will try and mate with.
There may be kind of one big male, one beach master that
tries to basically control the access to any of these females.
You can often identify the kind of older males by the scars that
they have.
The pups are left on the colony alone.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: First seal down and starting to push any
squeamishness aside. I team up with a fellow newbie to scour
the beach for more carcasses.
SUE GREGORY: Hello, my name is Sue, I'm a volunteer.
I'm really interested in seals so to be able to come out,
actually be with like minded people who also love seals and
be able to talk seals is really, really good.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: In fact, if you're a seal super fan, like
Sue, the clear up even offers an intriguing lesson in anatomy.
SUE GREGORY: Oh, here's my first dead seal. There's not much of
it left and there's some nice bones!
So that's a scapula. The shoulder bone, that's the
humerus. So that's the long upper arm bone.
Oh dear. It's smelly.
There we are.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: The team spends the next few hours
spreading out and sweeping the beach.
The clear up is physically hard work, picking up carcasses and
heaving the heavy bags over the sand dunes to the trailer and
then doing it all again and again until finally, operation
seal clear up's complete.
CHRIS BIELBY: Pretty much the last of a grizzly haul,
shattered now!
I'm Chris Bielby, I'm the countryside manager for the
Norfolk Coast and Broads.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: And now what happens?
CHRIS BIELBY: So they will be taken back to our yard at Priory
Farm in Blakeney and we have a specialist contractor who's
brought a skip and they will then go in the skip with a
special lid put on top and then they 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's been fairly upbeat.
When the Tern colony arrives this will be so important.
Really pleased to get that done.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: After the beach clean up, Blakeney Point
stays relatively quiet for the rest of winter.
Then as the freezing weather melts away in the sunshine, this
coastal and salt marsh habitat bursts into life.
Spring has arrived and rangers and volunteers begin to prepare
for the next big natural spectacle of the year.
But before things get busy, there's still time for the
Blakeney team to enjoy the season at a more relaxed pace.
If you're an inlander at this time of year, you might get out
and about hiking or biking to see the natural world in full
bloom.
But if you live along the North Norfolk Coast, like National
Trust volunteer, Sue Gregory, you might prefer to take a
different mode of transport altogether for a nature safari
with a unique perspective.
SUE GREGORY: This morning I'm going to record some of the
sounds and describe some of the sights as I go kayaking in the
harbour at Blakeney.
It's middle of May. It's just such a lovely morning.
Coming north, I can see the old lifeboat house on Blakeney
Point, that iconic blue building.
We have the entrance to the Clyde Channel and then just
looking around the east hills and the pines.
I've now just kayaked across to the Blakeney Point and I'm just
sitting very quietly over some marsh which is flooded and I'm
now starting to see birds.
I've just had a flock of Oyster Catchers fly over the top of me.
There were a couple of gulls that were obviously stalking
their nests and they've just seen them off.
Other birds I've heard were a Curlew and this is an area where
it's quite good to see Spoonbills.
I just had a little Tern go right in beside me and pull out
a little sand eel and it's still managing to squeak with it's
food in it's beak.
It's just so nice to sit and float, but I'll have to put in
some effort and then I'll go home for breakfast.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: Over the next few months, the number of ground
nesting migrant seabirds turns arriving at this globally
important site to breed keeps growing.
It's summer on Blakeney Point and by now from shoreline to
June, this baby boom beach is a frenzy of noisy feisty families
of the feathered variety.
All this action on the beach requires 24 hour conservation
care such as patrols to keep away predators, population
counts and informing the public.
So Ranger Duncan Halpin leaves all his home comforts to head
off grid.
Moving into an old blue corrugated metal life boat house
where he and two assistant rangers spend eight months of
the year hanging out with some very rowdy neighbours.
DUNCAN HALPIN: My favorite part of the job is probably living on
the point over summer being literally stuck amongst the
wildlife.
That's an incredibly rewarding experience.
Summer on the point is an amazing time. There's again,
huge concentrations of life and a riot of noise. We have up to
3000-4000 Sandwich Terns nesting. They have a really,
really distinctive call which it really is the sound of summer on
this bit of coastline.
Little Terns are one of the UK's rarest seabirds. They're the
smallest tern in the UK and they make this almost squeaky. I
think it's a bit like a squeaky dog toy call as they fly over.
We do get the occasional Arctic Tern. The Arctic Tern has the
longest known migration of any animal. At the northern reaches
of their limit, they will effectively fly pole to pole
every single year.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: Other sights of summer at Blakeney include an
abundance of colourful coastal butterflies and splash in the
right puddle on an evening and you might see the sea sparkle
with blue bioluminescence.
As the long days of summer draw to an end the landscape changes
again, the thousands of Terns take off from their breeding
grounds to head to warmer climes forming part of the great late
summer migration in UK skies.
As colder weather creeps into the fresh water marshes eels
begin their epic and mysterious 4000 mile migration back to the
Sargasso Sea where they breed a single time before they die.
And rangers have migrated from the remote lifeboat house to the
familiar comforts of the Blakeney Ranger Hut. Autumn is
here and the coastline flaunts a seasonal look all of its own.
DUNCAN HALPIN: 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 from plants like Samphire and Sea
Purslane and Shrubby Sea Blite
They all start to change in late summer into the traditional
autumn colours that's the oranges, the bronzy colours.
And the salt marsh just takes on a completely different hue,
which when the light shining on, it just has this golden edge to
it. There's a nervous anticipation in late October
waiting for the first Seal pup.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: It's winter, mid December. The UK's in the
grip of a deep freeze, but the icy expanse of coastline and low
winter sun in Norfolk's big open skies look beautiful and I'm
just arriving at the Blakeney ranger hut for an event I've
been looking forward to witnessing for myself all year.
Duncan. Hello. Lovely to see you again.
DUNCAN HALPIN: Hello there. Last time you were here we were doing
the seal clear up. But let's go see the spectacle.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: We've just got out the jeep.
As we've been approaching today, at first, it was little velvety
heads of seals popping up from the waves and then the further
that we got towards the colonies, it was these huge
balls and then we started seeing the babies, little white furs
with their huge eyes and now we've reached a dense part of
the colony and we're going to look at how Duncan conserves and
tags these seals to help them and to help the spectacle keep
happening every year.
What's going on now duncan?
DUNCAN HALPIN: What we're gonna do is we're gonna try and spray
some pups with some marker spray.
It'll come out when they moult, but it'll allow us to track that
pup up to when it does start to moult. We're trying to get good
data for the Sea Mammal Research Unit.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: The rangers on the ground work like spraying
the pups with paint to identify them all feeds into a big study
monitoring the health of the UK seal population. As Doctor
Debbie Russell from the Sea Mammal Research Unit explains.
DR DEBBIE RUSSELL: Blakeney actually used to be a very small
colony.
20 years ago there was less than 100 Grey seal pups born at
Blakeney.
And now it's likely there's about 5000 pups born at
Blakeney.
It used to be that the number of seals that were born was
estimated through ground counts. But the size of the colony
essentially prohibits that. So our work now is to do so by
aerial survey.
There's an airplane 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 and count the pups
that are on them.
Grey Seals have historically been hunted at very high levels.
There has also been times where Grey Seals have been culled as a
result of potential interactions with fisheries.
So there was a much reduced population which is now kind of
recovering
And potentially expanding beyond what it would have been. So, the
UK probably has about 36% of the world's Grey seal population.
And in Europe, the UK has the vast majority of Grey Seals. So
it really is an incredibly important area for Grey Seals.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: Going up and tagging pups on the bottom.
Isn't the easiest conservation task.
DUNCAN HALPIN: It's a difficult job to get close to the pups.
The mums are very defensive and then you add in the bulls that
are on the beach.
It's all about having a look, seeing what the situation is and
then getting it done as quickly as possible to avoid disturbance
and avoid the possibility of getting bitten as well.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: So, what kit do we have to do this
conservation work?
DUNCAN HALPIN: We've got a bag of marker spray here and a
healthy can do attitude.
I'm gonna mark this pup with a blue and yellow mark. Hopefully,
if it doesn't run away!
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: Almost ballet like, Duncan quickly nips in and
out to spray the babies. But the super protective mums move
surprisingly quickly. They 24 stone or 155kg bulks lunging
towards the imposter teeth bared.
After Duncan's done this delicate dance, about a dozen
more times enough pups have been tagged for the day.
DUNCAN HALPIN: It's not a disturbance free procedure, but
the study zone is a very small part of the colony. So the
benefits sort of outweigh the negatives. We managed to spray a
few seals and we can go away and leave them in peace now.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: I've just left Duncan and I'm off to meet
two of volunteers who've been looking after Blakeney for the
whole year. Looking beyond the seals. I can see two figures and
that must be Hanne and Sue. Hi!
SUE GREGORY: Hello!
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: How does it feel being back here?
SUE GREGORY: Oh, it's absolutely fantastic. The seal colony, in
my opinion has expanded this year. I'm not quite sure whether
we're at the peak at the moment, but I suspect we may be.
HANNE SIEBERS: Hello. I'm Hanne Siebers. I've been volunteering
with the National Trust for five years. I go out here as often as
I can.
I find it uplifting, healing and I have absolutely no need for
going away on holiday. Best of all, I am National Trust
Property photographer.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: So, can you give us some of your top tips?
HANNE SIEBERS: If you want to photograph seals, you have the
rules like for any wildlife. Nature comes first.
It is of course different because I am privileged. I am
right in the middle of the rookery with a long lens, I can
zoom in. I try to capture a seal not looking directly into my
lens.
We have two pups here, they have just been sprayed one yellow,
one gold with a bull guarding his territory and the cow next
to the pups. I have a nice backdrop with the roaring sea.
I get down on my knees to be on the same level as the seals. I
use my long lens and a wide aperture. I get that shot now.
And this is really Blakely Point for me.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: A beautiful but a freezing day on Blakeney
Point might be time to head back for a cup of tea now.
When we started with the clear at the start of the year, it was
a little bit sad, a little bit gritty but coming back and
seeing just as far as the eye can see fat, healthy, gorgeous
seals doing their thing, expanding their colony. It just
goes to show what conservation can do somewhere like Blakeney.
DUNCAN HALPIN: It's a real success story here, seeing so
many seals and the numbers going up year on year. It's a great
reward for the work we do. Having such a massive
concentration of life in what is quite a small space is just
astounding.
MICHELLE DOUGLASS: Thanks for listening to this episode of the
National Trust podcast. We hope you've been inspired by this
programme and please remember to follow our guidelines for the
best safest and most disturbance free ways to enjoy the seals and
other wildlife at Blakeney Point.
For more information, follow the links on this episode's show
notes where you'll also find advice about how to photograph
seals responsibly without getting too close.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, keep listening for a brand new
series of the National Trust podcast launching in May, which
will be packed with more immersive audio adventures.
And don't forget to follow and review us on your favourite
podcast app or head to nationaltrust.org.uk/podcasts to
browse our full back catalogue of audio programmes.
For now, from me, Michelle Douglas. Goodbye.
GENERIC: Nature is amazing, but it's in crisis. Go wild for
nature. Once a week. If we work together, our skies will be full
of bird song again, air will be fresher and safer and rivers
will be clean. Head to save our wildisles.org.uk for inspiration
and ideas. So you can make a difference. Love nature and act
now to help save our Wild Isles.