Friday 2 January 2009

New Year's Day

Another great thing about living in Norwich is that it is so close to the coast. This made it easy for us to yesterday pootle down to Horsey in search of baby seals.

Although a grey day it wasn’t too unpleasant weather-wise. We lunched at the Nelson’s Head before heading off to the beach. From the pub I would suggest that it is a good mile/mile and a half walk to where you can view the seals. I hadn’t realised that Horsey was part of the Broads National Park, but apparently it is. The Park authority now rope off the beach on the sand dunes that are set back from water and beach itself so that the seals a relatively undisturbed. This is just as well as there were hordes of people there to witness this amazing event.



There seemed to be quite a mixture of seals at various stages of the reproductive process. Lying around on the beach were mating couples, pregnant females, pups suckling, inquisitive more advanced pups, and bulls swimming and diving in the sea.
Apparently once a pup has first malted they become quite inquisitive and have a tendency to come to have a look at these strange creatures that have in turn come to look at them. They clamber through the dunes in their own lovable and clumsy way coming very close to us humans, sniffing, snorting and passively growling as they do so. The pub below came right up to my feet. I’ve placed a short video on YouTube of this pup as it waddled towards me.