When Frisbee the seal was released back into the ice-cold waters of the North Sea last week, it was the end of a very long journey.
She’d been rescued from Horsey Beach in Norfolk by the RSPCA five months earlier after being spotted with a plastic frisbee toy stuck around her neck.
It was slowly — and painfully — killing her, threatening to make the four-year-old grey seal yet another victim of the plague of plastic destroying our oceans, which the Mail has been campaigning against for ten years.
Thankfully, Frisbee is one of the lucky ones. After months of care at the RSPCA’s East Winch Wildlife Centre, her life has been saved and she is now living back in her natural habitat. Here’s her remarkable story.
1. Barely able to move, hours from death . . .
Lying alone on Horsey Beach near Great Yarmouth, away from the colony of hundreds of grey seals who also call it home, the seal had taken herself off to die.
It had been six months since volunteers of the Friends of Horsey Seals society spotted the animal with a yellow frisbee stuck around her neck and they’d been trying to capture her ever since. It had been an agonising wait.
‘Adult seals are usually too big and strong for us to catch,’ says East Winch Wildlife Centre manager Alison Charles. ‘Their natural instinct is to run because they’re scared. If you chase them down the beach with a big net, they get into the water — and they’re faster than you.
Frisbee the seal had been rescued from Horsey Beach in Norfolk by the RSPCA five months earlier after being spotted with a plastic frisbee toy stuck around her neck
‘The only way to catch them is to wait for them to become weaker. Only when they feel awful can you catch them. It’s horrible.’
The RSPCA has been seeing ‘netting’ injuries on seals — those caused by plastics like fisherman’s nets — since 2007.
‘Since then it’s just got worse and worse,’ says Alison, who’s worked with seals for more than 20 years.
‘But with Frisbee it was so dramatic. We felt so helpless but were determined to get her.’
Then, on September 15, Friends of Horsey Seals spotted her lying alone. Alison and her colleagues dashed to the beach and managed to catch her in a net before taking her to the wildlife centre.
‘I thought I’d have a dead seal by the time I got her there,’ says Alison. ‘She was so emaciated, so collapsed. Normally they’ve got more spark about them, more life but she had none. I didn’t think she had long left.’
Pitifully thin, she hadn’t eaten for weeks because the toy around her neck — probably discarded by a holidaymaker — prevented her from catching fish.
Meanwhile, an infection from the wound was rampaging through her body. She weighed just 10st 7lb, barely a third of a seal’s normal weight.
2. Trying to cut off the plastic frisbee
Alison was desperate to remove the plastic frisbee, but she knew she had to wait until a vet had checked over the patient.
‘Because it had been on for a long time, cutting it away it could cause toxins to be released around the body. So you use a combination of steroids, antibiotics and pain relief first,’ she explains.
Frisbee immediately received three injections — one of each. Minutes later, Alison started cutting the frisbee off with scissors, while the seal still was wrapped tight in the netting used to catch her so she couldn’t thrash around.
‘The plastic had become brittle and hard to cut. I got one side off but I just couldn’t get the other because it was so deeply embedded in her neck,’ recalls Alison.
Centre manager Alison Charles started cutting the frisbee off with scissors, while the seal still was wrapped tight in the netting used to catch her so she couldn’t thrash around
Eventually she managed it.
‘The smell was absolutely foul because that thing had been on for so long, she was so badly infected.
‘When I took it off, I thought her head was going to fall off.
‘Because the frisbee had been on so tightly, it had concertinaed her neck up so when I took it off, her neck kept extending and extending and extending. My heart just sank. I thought: “What have I done? I’ve made a big mistake”. I feared she wouldn’t make it.
‘But, eventually, her neck stopped extending so we bathed it briefly — we thought she’d already been through enough that day — then we went to leave her.
‘As I was going, she shook her head and I thought: “No! Don’t do that — your head will fall off! Keep it still.” But she seemed to be saying: “Wow — that feels good!” ’
3. Her injury led to a huge infection
The next day, Alison walked into the centre’s intensive care unit not knowing what she would find.
‘She was a completely different seal,’ she says today. ‘She seemed to be saying: “Yay, feed me!” which was fabulous.’
But Alison knew the youngster — seals can live to 20 in the wild — was far from out of the woods. Vets told her they didn’t know if she would make it. The injury on the back of her neck was so deep where the frisbee had cut in, you could fit a fist into the gaping wound.
‘It was horrendous — I’d never seen anything like it,’ says Alison.
It soon became clear that Frisbee wasn’t happy so, a week into her stay, Alison decided to take her out to a small pool at the centre, a more natural habitat, in the hope that she’d improve
‘It was like when you chop a tree down and cut a wedge in one side — it was about five inches deep.
‘We wondered if it would be kinder to put her to sleep, but the way she was behaving, we knew she wanted to live, so we had to give her a chance.’
For a week, Frisbee stayed in a cage in the intensive care unit and was given daily injections of painkillers, two courses of antibiotics to kill the infection and steroids to help calm her wounds.
But it soon became clear that Frisbee wasn’t happy so, a week into her stay, Alison decided to take her out to a small pool at the centre, a more natural habitat, in the hope that she’d improve.
4. Scarred – but she kept fighting
Being in the water and out in the open air started to work. Frisbee started to do well. By now, she was eating a handful of mackerel — bursting with the high-fat nutrition seals need — a day and loving them.
Staff could not give her any more in case it made her ill. They knew she would have been able to eat little in the months the frisbee had been eating into her neck.
‘On that first day, she just had one single mackerel,’ says Alison.
‘She must have been ravenous but I didn’t dare give her more —you have to gently increase food.’
Being in the water and out in the open air started to work. Frisbee started to do well. By now, she was eating a handful of mackerel a day and loving them
After a few days, the seal was moved to a bigger pool — the size of two garages and about 5ft deep. It was filled with 100kg of salt each day to help the healing process.
A public appeal to donate the huge amount of salt they needed, launched just hours after Frisbee’s rescue, had been successful so they had plenty to aid her recovery.
‘I think the postman was cross because we kept getting these huge 25kg salt bags in the post,’ laughs Alison.
‘People were so kind. It was really nice to have them keep turning up. And they worked — over the next few weeks the salt baths really helped the healing process.’
It wasn’t until more than a month after she was captured — on October 25 — that Alison felt confident Frisbee would make it. ‘I’m not a pessimist but we’d never had a wound that bad — but we kept going because she wasn’t suffering.’ It was the first frisbee injury they’d seen, the wildlife centre is used to dealing with seals caught in plastic and netting, regularly seeing them with fishermen’s netting wrapped around their neck or their entire bodies. All nets and plastics dig deep into the flesh of the seal causing terrible infection.
Alison said: ‘The big worry was that she wouldn’t be able to extend her neck to be able to catch a fish in the wild because of that scar —that’s what I was concerned about and that’s why we kept her in the centre for so long.
‘Once we moved her to a deeper pool, we’d throw a fish in at the other end and make her swim for it so she had to extend her neck. If she couldn’t do that, we wouldn’t have been able to release her.’ By then, she was eating a massive 4kg (9lb) of mackerel a day. Costs were starting to mount. Frisbee was just one of 140 seals the RSPCA was caring for across the UK — more than ever before and many suffering preventable plastic injuries — and the charity now spends a massive £3,500 a week just on fish, which prompted the launch of an urgent appeal for funds.
Back in Norfolk, having addressed her physical problems, staff began to worry about Frisbee’s mental welfare. So she didn’t get lonely, they put another rescued seal with her. But the pair started fighting and they had to be separated.
5. Uncertain looks – but free at last!
At the end of January, more than four months after she arrived, Alison realised Frisbee was ready to go back to the wild. The wound had healed, thanks to the antibiotics and salt baths, and she’d fattened up, now weighing a staggering 28st 4lb (almost 18 stone more than when rescued).
But the release had to be planned like a military operation.
Six experienced staff were needed to shepherd her into the water.
Sending such a large mammal back into the wild is fraught with danger and they can’t risk anyone getting injured.
‘Seals don’t intend to hurt you,’ says Alison.
At the end of January, more than four months after she arrived, Alison realised Frisbee was ready to go back to the wild
‘But if you’re between them and the sea they’ll get upset and might run over you or take a chunk out of you. They’re wild — you don’t know how they’ll behave.’
When the day — Wednesday, February 21 — dawned, things began promisingly.
‘It was very slick, Frisbee was very obliging and popped out of the pool when we drained it and into the livestock trailer,’ says Alison.
But she was less obliging when they arrived at Horsey Beach.
‘She didn’t want to get out of the trailer. She just sat in it. She must have felt safe.
‘So I went in and I think I freaked her out — she immediately turned and raced onto the beach!’
6. A sniff of the sea, and she charges in
Staff used special shepherding boards to guide Frisbee from the trailer, up a sandy hill and down to the sea. ‘I think the moment she got to the top of the hill, she knew where she was,’ says Alison.
‘They can smell and hear the sea and know they’re back where they’re meant to be.’
Her release had been posted on social media so the beach was full of excited onlookers and members of the Friends of Horsey Seals group who’d saved her.
‘There was a sea of faces, all saying: “Oh, she’s beautiful”, which was lovely to hear. We just let her take her time getting to the sea — she didn’t need to be rushed.
‘She’s a nervous animal and we wanted it to be calm for her.
Plunging into the waves, Frisbee is quickly back in the North Sea where she belongs, with the beach full of excited onlookers as her release was posted on social media
‘It couldn’t have gone better. She had a moment’s hesitation at the bottom when she got to the water, but then she was off!’
Plunging into the waves, Frisbee is quickly back in the North Sea where she belongs.
‘She zoomed off and soon disappeared, swimming really strongly which was great to see,’ says Alison. ‘She must have been so happy to be home. It’s exhilarating for us, it’s what we live for.
‘I just hope we don’t see her again. If we don’t, we’ll have done our job. But I hope to get reports of how she’s doing and sightings. I’d really love to hear that she’s going to have a pup.’
However, Alison says East Winch RSPCA’s job is far from done.
There are four more seals with netting injuries still to save on Horsey Beach alone.
‘It’s heartbreaking to think this could be prevented if people just took extra care with litter on the coastline,’ says Alison.
‘Take it home — don’t leave it for animals to get entangled in it.’
- To donate to the RSPCA’s seal appeal, go to rspca.org.uk and search for ‘seal’.