Leo

When we release pups at Ballykinler, it is always by courtesy of the army training camp, and we have to be escorted through the very extensive site to the shore. For Leo we need hardly have gone to all that trouble, however, because by evening he had swum the 10 km back to Minerstown! By the early hours of the next morning he was making a series of feeding dives over over a minute. We were so pleased we cheered him on from the shore while recording his dive times! He seemed to be fishing very close beside the haul-out site and one day we watched him diving in just a few feet of water, very close to the Minerstown beach. For the next two and a half months Leo made Minerstown his head quarters, sometimes paying a brief visit to Ballykinler. After a few days he graduated to diving several hundred metres offshore, and for the next two and a half months we usually located him somewhere between Minerstown and Ballykinler. The day after his release he hauled out with the other seals at Minerstown. On the first occasion a couple of older seals seemed to be giving him a bit of a hard time, but from then on there was no trouble, and Leo seemed to be an accepted group member. Each time we saw him hauled out he looked nicely rounded and plump! On September 21 we saw him hauled out close beside another pup. The last known sighting of him was on November 2nd at Minerstown and the last radio signal was on November 18th, diving quite close in to the shore at Newcastle (SW Dundrum Bay) , at a spot we have noted be be a popular foraging area for our pups.