Since around Christmas of 2024, our BDMLR team in Cornwall and colleagues at the Seal Research Trust have been looking out for an adult female grey seal known as ‘Nanette’, who had been sighted on a few occasions at a semi-accessible site in north Cornwall and potentially in a position to be able to be captured and cut free.
On two occasions the decision was made to launch a rescue effort, however, very sadly disturbance from people on the clifftop ignoring barriers, warnings and direct advice from SRT volunteers monitoring the site resulted in many seals including Nanette being scared off into the sea before the BDMLR team were able to get there, wasting the opportunity for rescue and prolonging Nanette’s painful situation.
On Friday 31 January their luck changed on the third attempt and a team of five experienced BDMLR volunteers including a veterinarian were able to access the beach undetected with capture equipment. They were able to immobilise her first in a large cargo net, and then further restrain her in a specialist stretcher to help keep her still while the entanglement was assessed.
A small amount of monofilament net was found to be cutting so deeply into her neck that the wound had healed over the top of it around most of her neck, enclosing it within her body. This made disentangling her far more difficult as the knots of the net could not be pulled through cleanly, and thus the team had to figure out a system of cutting knots in a specific order to release the strands, which could then be carefully extracted and fully free her so that she could be released again.
We would like to thank the surveyors at the Seal Research Trust as well as the BDMLR team whose planned action in a challenging scenario paid off in giving Nanette a better quality of life net-free.
Photos: Dan Jarvis/Andy Rogers
