We moved to Mount Maunganui, a small seaside community in New Zealand’s beautiful Bay of Plenty, 10 years ago for my husband Phil’s work as a marine biologist. I had seen seals around Pilot Bay, which is near here. Sometimes you see them out on the rocks, sunning themselves or playing – but usually in their own territory.
It was a dark winter morning in August this year when the seal came. At 5.50am, I left the house to go fitness training. I went down to the car parked in the driveway and heard a growl. I thought our ballsy cat, Coco, must have chased a dog under the car.
I jumped into the car to avoid getting my ankles nipped, and moved slowly, but then I felt the car rub against something. When I got out to have a look, I couldn’t see anything and thought it must have moved on. Then when I got back into my seat, I saw a baby seal in the headlights.
I thought, “Oh my God,” but didn’t panic – the ocean is just down the driveway and I thought it would find its way back. Off I went to training and gave everyone there a laugh when I said, “Sorry I’m late, there was a seal under the car.”
I didn’t think about it again until I got home. As I walked through the garage, I noticed our buckets had been moved. I wondered if it was the seal, but dismissed it because I didn’t think it could fit through the cat flap, which was the only way into the garage. But I was wrong. As I opened the door to the house, I brushed something and heard this flip-flip-flip-flip sound, and thought, “My God, that is the seal.”
It was so cute, like an adorable soft toy with big dewy eyes. Part of me wanted to keep it, but seals smell bad. I was conscious it was a wild animal, and while it was cute, I didn’t want to find out how sharp those teeth were.
It looked at me. I retreated and went to check on the children. They were asleep. I phoned Phil, who was on his way home from a work trip, thinking he was not going to believe what was happening.
The seal was in the house for another half hour or so. I was sitting near the bottom of the stairs, and could hear it grunting and puffing. I put my head into our spare room to find it had made its way in there, and up on to the couch. It was trying to get on to the standing desk. I said, “Oi, no!” It turned and looked at me, and settled down, which was very civilised.
We called a ranger from the Department of Conservation, and someone came to pick up the seal. It is sad to see a wild creature wrapped up in a net, but I was comforted after the ranger said it would be released in a sheltered spot away from dogs.
We hadn’t seen Coco for a while and were worried. Then an hour later, she appeared on the neighbour’s fence meowing, probably retelling this whole big story about the seal. She refused to go downstairs for a few days.
I hadn’t thought of sharing the story, but the next day we thought we should help the department raise awareness about seals in the area. We posted the photos on social media and it snowballed. It was pretty amusing to have people around the world see it.
We did about 15 to 20 interviews over a week, and there were a lot of emails from journalists in Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Malaysia and Thailand. It felt nice to be a light news story, because there was some pretty grim news in between. I could understand why people were so ready to have a laugh.
It was quite a weird experience to have all that attention for a week, but we have commemorated it. It was Phil’s birthday in September and I had an obvious gift for him: a T-shirt with the logo “A seal visited my house, and all I got was this T-shirt”.
There are still some people in our community who don’t know about the seal. My son’s hockey teacher came to babysit and I said, “Oh you can see where the seal was.” She just looked confused. It is quite funny – a story can reach right around the world but someone down the road doesn’t know what the hell we are talking about.
As told to Eva Corlett
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