Seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, 2,466 seals a-pupping…
Winter. A couple, on the verge of having a baby, are forced to make the arduous journey back to the place of their birth. Once there, she labours alongside animals, exposed to the cold air. As if that weren’t enough, afterwards a group of uninvited guests show up. No, not three kings but an ogling family, bearing no gifts, dressed unwisely for the weather and having struggled to follow the satnav.
It’s seal pupping season around here. Every autumn and winter, female grey seals haul themselves ashore to give birth, having returned to the same beach on which they themselves were born. We’d heard seal pup spotting was a December tradition locally, so after decorating the tree we piled into the car, put the dog on a short lead, and dragged the children along the blustery dunes, behind a fence erected to keep visitors at least 30ft from the new arrivals. The first clue that we were in for something a little special was a chalkboard nailed to a charcoal black beach hut. “Seals on the beach,” someone had scribbled. “Pups 1,232 Adults 2,466.”
Surely a mistake, I thought, and as we topped the dunes our first glimpse of the beach suggested an empty stretch of sand, dotted with black and mottled rocks. Then one moved. A strange, rolling lollop, mirroring the flip of excitement we felt in our stomachs.
The rocks were alive, and they were everywhere. Big, dark males raised their heads to look left and right as if protecting their families while crossing a road. Paler females laboured or lay exhausted beside tiny, white cotton wool balls, just days old yet playing their perfect part in a performance that rolls out year after year, the narrative buried deep within their DNA.
It was awesome. Not in the Americanised sense of the word, but in the religious. The way a soaring cathedral leaves you struck by a sense of some
Baby boom: a grey seal pup on the beach at Blakeney Point in Norfolk thing far beyond you, yet deep within you too.
These were our neighbours. Every bit as free, dignified and significant. More, in fact, since they had full reign over the beach and the sea while we humans stood kettled behind the fence, the inversion of the zoos we visited in the city.
The seals are not the only ones to have given us this feeling. First there was the owl, whose hoots while standing sentinel over the moon have, I now realise, faded from thrilling to familiarly companionable. Then the bats, who swoop low over our heads come evening, tracing an invisible loop from the church tower to our back door. And the deer, darting zigzag across the footpaths we obediently adhere to…
Our local seal colony is not even Norfolk’s biggest. Down the coast at Blakeney, they are expecting a record baby boom of more than 4,000 pups (harbour seals also live here – a smarter set than our grey seals, which follows, since our own house budget might just have stretched to a beach hut in this more glamorous postcode).
Still, a sighting of grey seals is not to be sniffed at. There are fewer in the world than African elephants. The first pup was spotted at Blakeney in 1988. A modest 25 were born there in 2001. Since then it’s become England’s biggest colony, with 3,399 born last year. Such a startling quantity, in fact, that rangers are having to rethink the way they count them.
And the baby boom is not confined to Blakeney. On our patch, more than 200 local volunteers have turned out this winter to patrol the beach and keep us humans from spoiling things. It’s working. Grey seal numbers dropped to about 500 in Britain in the early 20th century, but our islands are now home to over than 120,000. That’s 40 per cent of the world’s population. A real Christmas miracle.