Do Not Disturb

With overseas holidays largely off the cards, Britain is bracing itself for a season of ‘staycations’. But what does this mean for our local wildlife?

- Andrew Griffiths

Sue Sayer is founder and director of Cornwall Seal Group Research Trust. Her passion for seals began more than 20 years ago, when she answered an advert in the local paper for somebody to help on a monitoring project. That day, Sayer learned something that was to change her life: that every seal has got a unique fur pattern.

“As soon as I knew that, I could start answering questions,” she says. Was that three seals she was watching in the bay? Or the same one bobbing up three times? Sayer initially thought her own seal colony consisted of about 30 individuals. She now estimates more than 800 pass through.

The intervening 20 years has taught Sayer many things about seals – not least just how sensitive they are to human disturbance.

Holiday hordes

Recent research conducted by the trust has shown that at sites around St Ives, seals were disturbed an astonishing 14 times per hour. Perhaps most worrying of all, a major cause of these disturbances (40 per cent across all sites) was commercial wildlife tour boats.

This is the essential conundrum of wildlife tourism – the very real danger that we might destroy the very thing we have come to see.

Given the chaotic scenes in the UK countryside last year, when lockdown restrictions were eased, many who work with wildlife are bracing themselves for a similar onslaught during this ‘staycation summer’, caused by restrictions on overseas holidays.

How to photograph seals