On Thursday we took the day off and went to Donna Nook, a muddy Lincolnshire beach, managed by Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust. Every year towards the end of October, grey seals begin to congregate on the beach – females to give birth, and males to mate, strictly in that order! Within a couple of weeks there are a lot of female seals and recently born pups, with a smaller number of bull seals. Birth is a quick affair, a matter of seconds, difficult to predict. The female merely twitches her tail around a bit, and the pup practically falls out. We just missed a birth, seeing the scrawny pup, stained yellow from the afterbirth.
Pups feed intensivly for three weeks building up a thick layer of blubber before mum leaves them, heading out sea, the pups having to fend for themselves. Within days hunger drives the pups themselves to leave for a life in the ocean. The opportunity to see the seals is a window of four to six weeks, when visitors can walk along the shoreline, separated from the wild seals by a fence, with pups and females just a foot or so away, as well as spread out across the muddy beach.
It was a long day, nearly three hours of driving each way (setting off later than intended after Chantal lost a vital camera filter). I had planned a pub lunch followed by a coastal walk, but it was late by the time we finished seal-watching, and although the pub was still serving, it was fully booked. Instead we drove to Gibraltar Point, a bird watching centre an hour further south, but it was dusk by the time that we got there, and the café was only serving coffee and cakes before closing, and so it was a brief stop for a snack before we headed home. More images in”our recent photos”.
Technically we live in Oaktree House, but sadly the tree had to go.
We now have a thriving Oakstump at the front of the house.
