Safe haven

Risk, Scrabble, Bop It... not games night at the pub but the rescued seals at Mallydams Wood Wildlife Centre. Melissa Hobson spends a day nurturing ailing pups on their road to recovery

- Melissa Hobson

Rescued seal pups as young as a few weeks old can arrive at Mallydams Wood in need of urgent care for bite wounds, entanglement injuries, parasites, or after separation from their mums

There's just a pig board between me and the lively grey seal barrelling towards me down the corridor. Tipping the scales at about 27kg, the pup - a young male called Bop It - already weighs as much as an eight-year-old child. This is more of an inside look into the workings of a seal hospital than I'd expected.

I've somehow found myself helping the team at the RSPCA's Mallydams Wood Wildlife Centre in East Sussex to shepherd this lively grey seal down the corridor to be weighed. Bop It can't be released back into the wild until he reaches 40kg (for females, it's 35kg) as, in the wild, pups are around 45 to 50kg when they leave their mothers to fend for themselves. Yet the seals aren't always as accommodating as Bop It on weigh-in day. Sometimes it takes a fish on a stick to lure the patient towards the scales, or a stretcher to carry them.

“They all have different personalities,” wildlife rehabilitator Sharna Richardson tells me as she shows me the facilities. “Sometimes they're anxious and really defensive. Then they might be more likely to lash out and try to bite at the boards.”

Richardson introduces me to the residents: Risk, Hopscotch, Scrabble and Kiss Chase, to name a few. The names have a theme each season - currently, it's games. During one rescue, “the seal was thrashing around in the cage as we were taking it up the beach,” says new staff member Jack McKenzie who had volunteered for a year before joining the team. Its name was obvious, he says. Helter Skelter.

SEAL LIFE

There are 19 different seal species and two of these are found in the UK: grey (