Admire seals, but do so at a safe distance

IF you live in the midlands, as I do, a trip to the seaside is exciting.

I’ve come back from a short break in Liscannor in west Clare, refreshed by the coastal scenery and wildlife.

I was staying with my sister-in-law. When the weather is fine, she goes for a swim in the sea before breakfast. One morning, she came back with a story of an encounter with a seal.

As she described it, both the swimmer and the seal were aware of each other and both were fascinated and nervous. They stared into each other’s faces at a range of 20 or 30 metres, treading water. This went on for a minute or so. Both were reluctant to break eye contact, but neither wanted to approach any closer. Then, the seal disappeared.

Apparently, she quite often meets seals when she’s swimming and she wanted to know if, in fact, they could be dangerous. This is not a stupid question.

We have a tendency to romanticise our marine mammals, such as seals and dolphins, and sometimes forget we are talking about large, wild predators. The Atlantic grey seal can grow to more than two metres long and bull seals can exceed 300kgs, though the average is slightly less than this. They have fearsome teeth — equivalent to those of a lion — to equip them for catching large fish, as well as claws two to three cm long on their flippers.

So the short answer is that they’re quite capable of doing a lot of damage to a swimmer. However, I’ve never heard of anyone being attacked in the water, except in exceptional circumstances, such as the seal being tangled in a fisherman’s net.

One thing we know about seals is that facial expressions and gestures with their flippers are important forms of communication for them. As we don’t speak this language, it’s quite possible that a swimmer could send an aggressive message to a seal without being aware of it.

Seals on land are a different proposition. I know this, because I was once attacked by one and it was one of the most frightening wildlife encounters of my life. A cameraman and I had landed from a small inflatable boat on an island off the Kerry coast. It was late autumn, the breeding season for Atlantic grey seals, and we were trying to film footage of the new-born pups.

But the pupping season is also the mating season, so the breeding beaches are covered not only with cow seals suckling their young, but also with a small number of the largest bull seals competing to mate with as many of the cows as possible.

We were concentrating hard on filming the white, round-eyed pups when, out of nowhere, one of these beach-master bulls appeared and charged us.

We tried to run away but it was a stone beach, covered in wet boulders of all sizes and shapes, an impossible surface to run on.

The bull had no such problems. It was moving at astonishing speed, rearing up, waving those front flippers with the claws, and snarling.

It was coming down the slope at us and it looked terrifyingly large.

There were a few seconds of nightmare as we scrambled and floundered over the greasy rocks.

The seal did not press home its charge. With the wisdom of hindsight, it probably regarded us as competition and was quite satisfied by the fact that we were obviously trying to retreat.

But, at the time, it was hard to apply that kind of behavioural logic to the situation.

And the incident left me with a profound respect for seals.

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