MICHELLE DOUGLASS: Hello, happy new year and welcome to the

National Trust Podcast. I'm Michelle Douglass. Before we get

on with the story, I quickly wanted to share with you that in

March this year, the National Trust Podcast will be changing

so we can bring you more immersive tales in nature,

history and adventure.

This strand will become our nature podcast, The Wild World

Of... And look out for our new history podcast, Back When.

Remember to follow either show in your favourite podcast app to

be the first to hear new stories when they arrive.

Now, on with today's podcast. In this favourite episode, we're

travelling to Blakeney Point on England's east coast to discover

how this seemingly inhospitable shingle spit is home to one of

the UK's biggest and fluffiest natural phenomena every winter.

We'll be following Blakeney Nature Reserve through every

season to uncover the spectacles and secrets of life on this

rugged landscape.

Be prepared, 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 4,000 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's a great example of why we're 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 round the carcass. So the rats

in that burrow 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. Part and parcel of the of nature

if you like. During the popping the mortality here runs at

something like five percent 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 percent.

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 St Andrews University, explains.

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 oestrus, 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's 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 superfan 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. Is that the 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.

Found another one.

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-Ups complete.

CHRIS BIELBY: 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: And now what happens?

CHRIS BIELBY: So they will be taken back to our yard at Friary

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 arises, it'll 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 round, 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.

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 its food

in its 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, terns, arriving at this globally

important site to breed, keeps growing.

It's summer on Blakeney Point. And by now, from shoreline to

dune, 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 lifeboat

house where he and two assistant rangers spend eight months of

the year hanging out with some very rowdy neighbours.

DUNCAN HALPIN: My favourite 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 three, four thousand 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 spa 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 freshwater marshes, eels

begin their epic and mysterious 4,000 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 blight, they all start to change in late

summer into the traditional autumn colours the oranges the

bronzy colours and the salt marsh just takes on a completely

different hue, which when the light's 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 bulls.

And then we started seeing the babies, little white furs with

their huge eyes. And now we've reached a denser 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 going to do is we're going to 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 Dr Debbie

Russell from the Sea Mammal Research Unit explains.

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 5,000 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 aeroplane 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 gray 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.

Going to mark this pot with a blue and yellow Mark. Hopefully

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, their 24 stone or 155 kilogram 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's a very small part of the colony, so the

benefits sort of outweigh the negatives. We've managed to

spray a few seals, so 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 the 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! Hello!

HANNE SIEBERS: Hello, Michelle!

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 now 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 Blakeney Point for me.

MICHELLE DOUGLASS: A beautiful but freezing day on Blakeney

Point. Might be time to head back for a cup of tea now.

When we started with the clear up 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. I hope you've been inspired by this

programme. And please remember to follow our guidelines for the

best and safest ways to enjoy the seals and other wildlife at

Blakeney Point, including how to responsibly photograph seals.

For more information, follow the links in this episode's show

notes. 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. Until next time, goodbye.