This blog was written by Katy Wearing, Seal Rescue Ireland. Thanks a million, we here at SRPI really appreciate the effort and all you do at the centre!
“Seal Rescue Ireland, this is Emilie. How can I help you?” This is how Seal Rescue Ireland intern, Emilie answered SRI’s 24 hour rescue hotline early Thursday evening on the 10th of May. During the previous weeks, most hotline calls had not been about stranded seal pups, as Ireland had been experiencing the lull between grey seal and common seal pupping seasons. The note of urgency in the caller’s voice therefore came as something of a surprise. “I would like to report a seal with some fishing line wrapped around its neck, on the Saltee Islands.”
As an intern at Seal Rescue Ireland, the only seal rescue centre in the Republic of Ireland, you live in fear of the ringing of the rescue phone. At least once a week each intern is bound to the phone, which is live 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and responds to whatever calls are received. If a member of the public has found a seal which they believe to be sick, injured, or orphaned, then they give us a call and the process of rescue, and potentially rehabilitation, grinds into action. It is important for us to make sure that we only intake seals which are truly in need of our assistance, as we rely heavily on public donations to keep us running (we get less than 5% of our funding from the government); it can be very challenging to tell whether a seal is just resting on land or whether it is in need of help. Seals are unlike cetaceans (dolphins and whales), in that they spend long periods of time hauled out on dry land and only need to enter the water in order to hunt for food. In fact, seals need to rest on land to regain their strength and re-oxygenate their blood, as they expend huge amounts of energy while hunting and use up their oxygen stores while taking long dives (seals have been recorded to hold their breath for up to 30 minutes!). It was not difficult to tell that this particular seal was in need of rescue, however, as entanglement is something which we are unfortunately fairly familiar with here at Seal Rescue Ireland.
According to Ellen MacArthur, by the year 2050 there will be more plastics in the ocean than fish (Wearden). In the past decade alone, fatal entanglements and consumption of marine debris by marine animals has increased by 40% (Thompson). We have seen numerous cases of entanglement ourselves. The problem arises when a young seal gets trapped in plastic; while the seal continues to grow, the plastic does not, resulting in wounds which can cause infection and a slow and painful death. This is why speed is imperative when dealing with an entanglement case; the sooner we get the plastic off the animal, the less damage is done.
Unfortunately, by the time we received the call, it was too late for a boat to return to the island. This is the part that makes working the rescue phone so stressful. Often a seal is not in a convenient location, or our dedicated rescue volunteers are not available at the time that it needs rescue. It can be the most humbling and devastating feeling to know that there is a seal in distress but be unable to get to it, and this was the predicament which faced Emilie on Thursday. She made contact with Declan Bates, the man who runs the ferry to the Saltee Islands, and tried reaching numerous other volunteers, working into the night to try to find a solution for the pup. Eventually, it was established that we would contact Declan in the morning to find out whether his ferry would be running that day. When Friday dawned stormy and rainy the prospects were very grim. The water between Kilmore Quay and the Saltee Islands is notoriously dangerous even on a pleasant day. Declan put it nicely for us on Friday morning, “Nobody is taking any boats out today; you would need a helicopter to reach the islands”. It says a lot about the dedication of Seal Rescue Ireland that this joking comment resulted in the intern who took over the rescue phone on Friday (that would be me!) reaching out to several of our volunteers that we thought might possibly own a helicopter. Even with the best will in the world, you probably won’t be able to find a helicopter, and so we waited another day.
Fortunately, Saturday turned out to be an outstandingly beautiful day. Having reserved seats on Declan’s ferry, Gale, Assistant Animal Care Manager, and I went to the centre early to gather supplies. Into the boot went a cage, herding boards, towels and gloves. We also prepared some electrolyte solution, tube-feeding equipment, and even a drip set as we were not sure what condition the seal would be in after several days of being entangled.
When we landed on the rocky shore of Great Saltee Island, Declan pointed out where our initial caller had last spotted the seal: just a little way to the left of the landing area, beside some large black rocks. Once we had left the small strip of sand where Declan dropped us, the terrain quickly became difficult to traverse. Many of the rocks were covered in kelp which made them extremely slippery and difficult to manoeuvre. I remember reflecting that this particular shoreline was probably the hardest place to spot a seal, as not only did the rocks look somewhat like seals from far away, but were configured in such a way that you could only see between them from certain angles. The seal was not in the spot where it had been originally seen. Gale and I continued to follow the shoreline. We began to spot seal pups, but they were all in healthy condition. Eventually, we made it to a spit of rocks at the end of the shoreline, and found an entire colony of grey seals, some of them even more mature than the pups we had seen earlier. Observing through binoculars, we established that none of them had anything wrapped around their necks. As the rocks became unquestionably impassable beyond that point, we turned around and headed back, walking closer to the water in case we had missed the seal on the way out.
By the time we could see the sandy landing strip, I was feeling thoroughly defeated. We had already used up two of the four hours we had, and even if we found the seal soon, it was bound to take a long time to capture and carry it back to the ferry. However, within moments my hopelessness turned to disbelief, as what should appear on the exact stretch of sand we had arrived on but a seal, with a very obvious entanglement around its neck. Since the rocks were difficult to navigate, we had left all of our equipment, save the towels which fit in Gale’s backpack, on that one stretch of beach. The seal emerged only a meter or so from the water, and then, noticing our abandoned equipment, paused to sniff it uncertainly. The irony of the situation struck Gale and me and we both started laughing. To be honest, I was rather stressed out. Here we were, observing from a distance as a seal, which obviously needed a lot of help sniffed at the equipment that we needed to catch it. The seal had emerged from the water so it was obvious that it was mobile enough to swim and make a quick getaway if it was frightened. One thing that you should know about seals is that, while they might be awkward on land, once they are in water, they are so agile that it would be impossible to capture them. We knew that we would have one shot, because if we scared the seal back into the water again, it would be unlikely to return.
“Do you mind if I am the one to sneak up on it?” Gale asked. As this was my very first rescue, I was happy to let her take charge; Gale has had extensive experience capturing anything from harbour seals to adult California sea lions, as she used to volunteer at the Marine Mammal Centre in San Francisco, California. At Gale’s instruction, I slowly walked to a spot higher up the beach from the seal and crouched down. The seal watched me, but I wasn’t close enough to scare it off the beach. Gale then, taking a rolled-up towel with her, began to painstakingly sneak up on the seal, trying to situate herself in the small area between the seal and the water. Her approach was almost comical as she walked doubled over only a few steps at a time, then crouched down when the seal looked at her. Only when it resumed scratching itself would she dare to take a few more steps. Once she was close enough, Gale stepped swiftly behind the seal, unrolling her towel to create a barrier between the pup and the water. I hurried down to them as the seal snarled at this sudden threat. Using another towel, I restrained the seal: I wrapped the towel around its head then quickly kneeled over it with my hands holding its head down and its muzzle closed before it could bite me. We quickly tube-fed it some electrolyte solution to rehydrate it and pushed it into the cage before it could return to the sea.
As it turned out, the actual rescue itself probably took all of fifteen minutes, which left us nearly two hours before the return ferry. After allowing the seal to calm down, Gale gave it some subcutaneous fluids from the drip set to make sure that it was thoroughly hydrated for the return journey. We covered the cage with blankets, and routinely poured seawater over it to keep it cool in the sun. Transitioning the cage onto the boat was challenging, but thankfully, the other ferry passengers were eager to help us. We took the seal directly to the Gorey Veterinary Practice, so that we could remove the entanglement right away. Dr. Lindy Vaughan, the vet who comes every few weeks to give her professional opinion on our seals, sedated the seal, and then cut away the netting. Thankfully, it had not yet cut into the muscle. She cleaned the wound and we returned to our Courtown Seal Rescue Centre to settle the new arrival in. Later that evening we decided to name him Maui, for the demigod in Moana.
Maui has been making steady progress since he arrived. Within days he was eating fish on his own and the fluid retention in his head and neck went down significantly with the removal of the entanglement. Within a few weeks, his wound had healed nicely and now he is developing his swim muscles and learning to compete with our other patients in one of the pools at Seal Rescue Ireland. Maui has stolen the heart of everyone at the Centre and beyond, but in every sense he is a very lucky seal. If the finder had not spotted him and notified us of him promptly, if the weather had not been good on Saturday, or if he simply had not hauled out at the time when Gale and I were returning to that very spot, then this story could have turned out very differently. Entanglement is a very real threat facing marine life, but it is also a threat that everybody can help to minimize. If you are interested in ways to prevent plastics from ending up in our oceans, check out the Seal Rescue Ireland blog for information on ecobricks. Protecting our oceans can be as simple as refusing to buy products which have a lot of plastic on them, and recycling whenever possible; there is no reason why we cannot prevent tragedies like this from occurring in the future.
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