麻豆约拍

Can I introduce Richard Taylor-Jones, to share his experiences at Blakeney Point grey seal colony.

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Blakeney Point is a very special place, and I鈥檓 by no means the first person to recognize that. It鈥檚 one of the very first National Trust Nature Reserves, created in 1912 after a successful campaign by eminent ecologist of his day, Professor Francis Oliver. Since then, it has been a refuge for wildlife studied by many hundreds of scientists. So, no, I鈥檓 far from discovering Blakeney as a unique landscape, but what I have been privileged to do, is be the first person to be allowed to live out on Blakeney Point with the Grey Seal colony during the winter months, and to try and reveal a little of their lives.聽

The colony has only really been in existence since the 1980鈥檚 and was initially very small, so no one paid a great deal of attention to it. But in the last few years that鈥檚 all changed. Numbers have gone through the roof, and now Blakeney has broken the barrier of producing a 1000 Grey Seal Pups, over 200 more than last year, reaching 1220 at last count. This has brought about a real interest in the colony, or Rookery, to give its correct term, and National Trust Rangers have taken up the mantle of surveying the animals twice a week to monitor the situation.

Even the Rangers only visit for a couple of hours at a time though. No one has spent real time out there in Winter to observe the seals in detail. So living in a leaky old wooden hut for two weeks and spending every day from dawn until dusk filming the seals, was always going to give us some great new stories. Also, I soon realized that unlike other colonies I鈥檝e filmed, the seals here aren鈥檛 overly scared of humans which allowed me astonishing access to their lives, and meant I could film their behavior in more detail than perhaps ever before in this country.

Another thing that made filming this rookery of seals so special for me was the timing. It was taking place in Winter. Previously I鈥檝e filmed Grey Seals in the Autumn, before the action-packed conclusion of the breeding season. This is when a lot of the big fights between bull males happen. It was always on my mind that filming a big fight in real detail would be a bit of a first, and I knew that the whole trip would hopefully build to that moment. Of course it didn鈥檛 happen straight away; there were an awful lot of very cute pups to be filmed first and initially we concentrated on a newborn that we called Millennium. Even then we couldn鈥檛 ignore the impressive males. As you settle into the first diary film, you will get a sense that the bulls have a big role to play in this very special landscape. And once you鈥檝e seen the outcome of all their posturing and threats, I suspect it will be as memorable as the place itself, it certainly was for me.