Pappy – a brief visitor

We picked up Pappy on 13 December after receiving a call from a couple living in Burra who were concerned about a grey seal pup who kept hauling herself up Papil beach and onto the road. We suggested they encourage it to return to the sea, which they tried three times but each time it came back onto the road.

It was a coarse winter night of wind and rain when we drove the 40 miles to Papil. There had been big storms all week and Pappy, a fully moulted grey seal pup, had probably just become exhausted and hauled out to get away from the big seas. She needed to come to the sanctuary for nothing more than a rest…safely away from any roads.

She was the biggest grey seal pup we have ever seen and was totally uninterested in all our efforts to tempt her to eat fish. After a week of resting under a heat lamp she let it be known she was ready to go back into the wild, so we simply opened the sanctuary doors and let her make her own way to the beach and the waiting sea, walloping across the car park slowly but surely. When she reached the shore we threw in some herring…and lo and behold she tucked in, accepting food for the very first time before taking off. We haven’t seen her since.