Sealing the deal: watching a cow teaching her pup

I’VE lived in the midlands for over 20 years now but once I spent a lot of time on the coast. This means that a return to the seaside is nostalgic and exciting.

It happened last week on a fishing trip on the Moy estuary. The fishing was slow but this didn’t matter because I was enjoying the sights, sounds and smells of the marine environment. I particularly enjoyed the many close encounters with seals.

These were ‘rón beag’, the small species that the English call common seals and the Americans harbour seals. Both names are used in Ireland. The Irish language name is a good one. These seals seldom exceed 100 kilos in weight while a beach-master bull of our other breeding species, the Atlantic grey seal, is normally over 300.

There are other differences between the two species, but one of them was particularly obvious last week in the Moy estuary. In Ireland, common seals give birth in June and the cows are very attentive mothers. Grey seals give birth in November and, as soon as the pups are weaned, the mothers abandon them to the harshness of a north Atlantic winter.

Common seal pups are born large and active and are weaned in a couple of weeks. (It seems illogical that a male seal is a bull, a female a cow, but a baby a pup). After that the cow starts teaching her single pup how to make a living. This is the process that fascinated me last week.

Seals are unpopular with fishermen who see them as competitors. There’s some truth in this because an adult common seal needs between two and three kilos of food a day. But not all of this food is fish. They also eat things that are easier to catch like crabs, octopus, whelks and squid. In fact, young common seals eat no fish at all and have a gourmet diet of crab and shrimp for the first month or so after they’re weaned.

In the estuary the cow seals were teaching their pups to forage for crab and shrimp in shallow water. Mother and child stayed close together. The mother seemed agitated if the pup was more than a metre away.

Although my text book says that common seals are not particularly vocal this agitation led to a lot of coughing, grunting and hissing by the cow.

Another rather charming thing the mothers did was encourage the pups to take a ride on their backs when the youngsters got tired from all the crab hunting. They were also protective if they thought that danger was about.

THE seals in the Moy estuary are used to people in small boats but they’re also fairly timid and disappear if you try and get closer than 20 or 30 metres. The exception to this is mothers with young pups who will face up to a human being and even threaten to attack. I was once attacked by a cow Atlantic grey seal and it was very frightening, but I’ve never heard of an actual attack by a cow common seal, just threats.

Eventually, the tide dropped and revealed a sand-bank and the seals hauled out to sunbathe. They’re very ungainly on land because true seals, unlike sea-lions or walruses, swim with their tails not their front flippers and all their muscles are concentrated at the aft end.

They also seem to dislike resting their tails and heads on wet sand and often adopt a strange banana shape when they’re hauled out.

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