Caithness Seal Rehab & Release.

We are a privately run small seal rehabilitation centre. Run by volunteers and costs are covered by donations from the public. We are the only seal rehabilitation centre in Caithness & Sutherland, in the Scottish Highlands. We are a fairly small centre but rescue an increasing number of seal pups year by year. We rescue seals from as far away as the Western Isle's and Skye, all along the north coast and down the east coast. This is a very large area to cover. We have a team of local volunteers, volunteers from all over the world and offer placements for veterinary or marine mammal students.

The centre opened in November 2022. To date we have rescued 40 seal pups, grey and common seal pups and have released 35 of these back into the sea. We currently have 11 common seal pups in with us at the moment.

We have a food preperation room for preparing each and every meal for the pups. We feed four times a day at the moment. The seal pups have a fish soup from day one, as they get older they progress to fish chunks of whole fish.

We have a ICU unit for the new admissions that are really sick or injured. They have a heat mat and a heat lamp in each pen. We can house four seal pups at a time in here.

Our third room is where we have pens for the older, healthier seals. These are mobile pens and can be adjusted in size and position. Each has its own paddling pool. This is the next move to becoming more independent. They learn to catch and eat fish in their paddling pools before moving on to the final stage in the big pool.

The final stage is the big pool where they learn to swim, use their muscles, catch fish and eat fish for themselves. Once the common seal pups reach a weight of 40kg+ and the grey seal pups of 35kg+, they are released in the bay just below us where we can keep an eye on them until they leave the bay to explore new territories.

What we are trying to do now is to raise funds for a small quarantine building that will have three separate pens for seal pups that have contagious or highly infectious viruses, or injuries where they need to be separated from the other seals for their own protection and for the protection of the other seal pups. This quarantine building will also have its own swimming pool. Ideally we would like to have this all in place and finished by the end of October 2024, ready for the admission of the grey seal pups. We are trying to raise £7000.00 for the costs of all materials. Labour will be donated in kind. If you could help us with this much needed project, please donate what you can to help us save more seals that have lost their mom due to various complications. 

The impacts of climate change are already making a huge difference to the pupping seasons for both common and grey seals. Common seal populations are declining, we are not sure of the reason as yet. This year we had three times the amount of pups compared to last year, more premature pups abandoned on beaches due to weather changes and availability of feed. The grey seal population is stable but we are losing more pups due to the storms in our area getting worse and worse due to climate change. We are here to try and save as many of the pups as we can to conserve the populations.