Has Mignon disappeared?

When we visited Mignon last week, she was doing well. While she was still unable to feed herself and had to be hand fed, she had put on a kilo of weight, and was adapting to life in the seal rescue centre. Everything seemed well. Imagine then our fright when we arrived at the centre today, walked over to her pen and she was not there! In her place was an even younger Grey seal, brought in just this morning. Grey seal pups are born with white fur which usually disappears in the first two to four weeks, and this one was still a patchy white colour, very fuzzy, very small and very scared.

I imagined all sorts of dreadful things had happened to Mignon: maybe she had become violently ill; maybe she had refused to eat; maybe one of her small wounds had caused a sudden and deadly infection. Luckily one of the carers came by and when I asked after Mignon – or number 323 as she is known at the centre – she happily told me that Mignon was alive and perfectly healthy. In fact, so healthy that she had been moved from her isolation pen into one of the small pools with two other seals!

The first step towards release
The small wounds she had when she arrived two weeks previously had healed, and she was lively and healthy. In the week since we last saw her, lab tests had found her to be free of infectious diseases, so she didn’t need to be in an isolation pen any more. In the last few days she had learned to feed herself, and had put on 1.1 kgs. At 20 kgs she was well on her way to achieving a healthy weight for a six week old Grey seal pup. All these factors meant that she could start down her path to being released. The first step of this path is to be put in a pool with a couple of seals of her weight. Here it is easy to observe her, and if she cannot cope, to remove her and put her back in her pen.



We walked to the pool, and there she was frolicking in the water, bobbing up and down to see who was coming to visit. It was almost feeding time, so all the seals in all the pools rushed to the side of the pool in hungry anticipation, pushing and shoving each other out of the way to be closest to the side. Grunts, snarls and other seal sounds filled the air. As the newcomer finding her way, Mignon clearly stayed away from her pool mates. It will only be a little while before she pushes and shoves with the best of them. After a couple of weeks ‘dry’ Mignon certainly looked happy to be wet again! We watched her and her pool mates for a while, before heading back to the Morgan, much relieved that she hadn’t ‘disappeared’.