Evie was found as a newborn pup on June 28, 2002. At first her mother seemed to be looking after her, but then disappeared, leaving Evie alone. Evie tried to climb up on to a high rock, but then gave up and stranded on the shore, crying, as the tide went out.
Newborn Evie stranding at Minerstown, Co. Down, June 28, 2002
The female we thought was her mother kept coming back, but didn't go to Evie's rescue. We waited for a couple more hours just to make sure that her mother wasn't coming back, and then we picked her up.
I'm cold! And hungry!
As soon as we saw her up close, we realised she was too tiny to survive in the wild. She was, in fact, only 8 kg, when she should have been about 11 kg. At first we had great trouble feeding her, because she threw up all her food, but eventually we managed to feed very small amounts of thin milk using a very narrow (lamb) feeding tube, and she gradually settled down. After five days she started to suck from a bottle.
Evie sucking from a bottle
Evie shared the pen with another pup called Olly. They always slept together in their 'bedroom' (a converted dog kennel with a movable lid).
Evie and Olly resting in their 'bedroom'
Evie also enjoyed sliding down her slide into the pool and playing games in the pool. When she was 47 days old she weighed 21 kg and we let her go, together with Olly. Because there was an epidemic threatened of the phocine distemper viral disease, we were worried about releasing them. We tried to obtain vaccine for them, but were unable to to so. As with Olly, we were worried about the threatening epidemic of distemper virus among harbour seals in the late summer of 2002. We therefore decided to take a chance that the virus would not strike until they had learned to feed and gone to offshore foraging grounds, where they might escape it. As a precaution, we released them at Millin Bay, about 30 km away from the larger centres of harbour seal population in Dundrum Bay.
Evie, with the radio tag glued to the fur of her head, just before her release
The day after Evie was released, she went round the coast a little and into Strangford Lough. She spent a month here at a sheltered haul-out site where there were a few other pups and other seals. We sometimes saw here through a telescope, swimming and diving around the rocks and evidently learning to catch little fish. We saw her contacting another pup and also bouncing around with 'play' movements – so we assumed she must be feeding and feeling well. After a month she went away on short expeditions, but kept coming back to Strangford Lough, which she seemed to be adopting as her home. There were a number of seal deaths in the autumn around the coast, but only two cases of distemper were confirmed. So far as we know, therefore, Evie was lucky and escaped the disease. Her tag fell off at the end of October 2002, and so far as we know, she is still in our local population and doing well.
