MONTY: Seal Encounters

It’s been, dare I say it, bloody cold up here. When I built the bothy – and the masterpiece that is the extension – I was a man with the warm sun on the back of his neck, a soft breeze in his face, and not a carpentry care in the world. Such a cavalier approach to joinery has now firmly bitten me on the bum – as the summer storms have set in, the damn thing now leaks like a sieve. I find myself crouched in the entire creaking edifice, stuffing towels into joins and cracks as water sluices in. I am permanently wet.

Periodically, I have to go outside and tramp around to feed wet pigs, moist sheep, damp hens and a soaked dog. Let me tell you that there is no more miserable looking animal than a wet hen, unless perhaps you include damp television presenters. I had envisioned a number of potential hazards when exchanging my postcode for a grid reference to come up here, however, I’m not sure I thought trench foot would be one of them. I found a toad in my welly boot the other day. It’s really, really wet up here.

I’m pleased to say that the sun peeked briefly through a gun-metal sky the other day, and I leapt at the opportunity to jump in the RIB and head off to the nearby island of Rona as there was a rumour of a massive seal colony at its northern tip. This is not something I was keen to get wrong by the way, as beyond the northern tip of Rona is, well‚ nothing really. Should the engine have cut out, I would have been drifting into the Atlantic, signalling passing aircraft with a pair of soiled underpants and trying to eat the kapok stuffing from within my lifejacket. I could call for assistance on the VHF of course, but the humiliation of being rescued by a tittering local fisherman makes the alternative of a slow death infinitely preferable.

The rationale behind the column this month lies in the fact that I had to read up on grey seals before heading out. This was to sound vaguely authoritative on camera, as opposed to some classic cheese from the Halls factory along the lines of ‘This is the grey seal. It’s grey. And it’s a seal’.

To do this I had to undertake an act of weird literary cannibalism. I read a chapter of Mike Dilger’s excellent BBC book Britain’s Best Wildlife. Brilliant, I commend it to you. As Beachcomber Cottage is a BBC series, it felt a bit odd, but anyway I headed off to the colony brimming with juicy facts.

Grey seals are fascinating, completely fascinating. They give birth to white pups, as when they first appeared here the place was covered in ice. They also give birth in the autumn for some reason best know to themselves. They can dive to 300m, they all pup simultaneously to swamp predators with potential prey, they can collapse all their body spaces on a dive, they can operate anaerobically when diving, and they saturate their blood with oxygen before a dive, becoming in effect their own diving cylinder.

Sixty per cent of them die before they are one year old, making the survivors the evolutionary elite. Due to pressure from man, they were down to only 500 individuals in Britain before the Grey Seal Act of 1914 saved them from extinction, and now their population stands at 124,000.

All of this coursed through my damp brain as I raced out to the seal colony. The dive was wonderful, with one young seal cavorting and gyrating around us throughout. We climbed out of the water elated, to head for home just as the rain closed in again. That was about a week ago, and it’s still raining now. Rainy place, Scotland.

My point is that I enjoyed the encounter with the seals so much more because I took half an hour beforehand to read up on them. My sense of wonder was dramatically enhanced by some juicy nuggets of biology and behaviour. How many times have I jumped in on a wreck with the sum total of my knowledge being that there is a large lump of metal on the sea floor beneath me? How many times have I dived knowing I would encounter a certain animal and yet not bothered to scratch below the surface to find out what a miracle of evolution and design it was? An hour with your nose in the books doubles the pleasure of the dive, it really does. Speaking of which, I must dash, as I’ve just noticed my bookcase appears to have a waterfall behind it!