The Boys are back in town

First seal pup to be born on Pilgrims Haven this year, having its first meal.
On Rona there are seals draped across large parts of the island.
The big boys are waiting to get their beaches back.

The numbers of seals coming back to the island is going up every day.

The little bit of red you can see on these flippers is a numbered tag so the seal researchers can identify individual animals and plot their life histories.

Seal season is building up here and it seems to be an early one. There are already more than 8 pups on Rona, a pup at Tarbet and the first to appear on Pilgrims Haven (you can watch the seals on Pilgrims Haven from the web cam linked to the Scottish Seabird Centre, follow this link http://www.seabird.org/webcam-may.asp) . And at each flat area of the island increasing numbers of seals are hauling themselves and starting to reclaim their beaches for the season. Whenever you go down to any of the bays you can feel eyes on you and just off the shore following your every move is a beach master a bull grey seal that is watching you. They spend a lot of time just floating around in the quiet water blowing bubbles, snorting and sizing up rivals but this is all a prelude to the real season when the seals come ashore. The Sea Mammal Research Unit are due out in a couple of weeks time to start their annual work looking in detail at the seals and they keep a blog going that tells of their work. Paula who writes the blog is a wizard at seal identification, she runs the project that uses the individual pelt patterns to identify different animals. To follow their work the blog address is
http://www.isleofmaygreyseals.co.uk/ and as they are the experts they will be able to tell you far more about these brilliant animals and their work.