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.