Baby seal found in family’s garden 18 miles from sea

December 23, 2009 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: News

A baby seal found in a family’s garden far from the sea has been nicknamed Rudolph.

The Dwyer family, of Breneden, Kent, received what they called a “brilliant Christmas present” in the form of a baby seal on Monday morning.

“It was bizarre,” Professor Tim Dwyer told the Press Association. “My daughter was out with our dog Jack in the snow when she came in and said ‘There’s a seal in the garden’. I said ‘No, it must be an otter’. We all went out and under the hedge was a seal, looking quite chirpy and slithering around in the snow.”

Tim Dwyer’s daughter, Harriet, described the sighting to the BBC: “We could see it came from the stream at the end of the garden from tracks in the snow. I heard Jack barking and went over to see what looked like a huge slimy cat.”

“Jack is a collie and rounded it up a bit and it eventually settled in the herb garden by the corner of the house,” she said.

“He was very good and, as collies do, he has a rounding instinct,” said Professor Dwyer, of the London South Bank University. “The dog was quite happy to keep it in one place.”

“My daughter, not very inventively, called it Rudolph, which seemed appropriate as it was sitting around in the snow,” he added.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) was called, and the baby seal was taken to the Mallydams Wood Wildlife Centre in Fairlight, Hastings, East Sussex.

It’s speculated that the baby seal crawled up into the garden from a stream that feeds the River Rother. The Rother eventually feeds into the English Channel at Rye.

Elaine Crouch, a keeper at the Wildlife Centre, told the BBC that baby seals often separate from their mothers due to storms. “This one is a really good weight and not starving but has been completely lost,” she said.

“She has a tag from Belgium, probably put on by the rehabilitation centre at Ostend, then she got into the River Rother and ended up in the stream.”

The team has renamed the baby seal Gulliver in honor of its fondness for traveling. A video of Rudolph/Gulliver can be found on the BBC Web site.