Seals and cameras on Sable Island

I am not terribly good at writing posts for this blog, as you can see. My last post was quite a while ago. However, I have someone re-designing my website and it has given me some inspiration and energy to write.

On Tuesday, 23rd October, I headed out to Sable Island for a week, which actually extended into more than that. The trip on one hand was exciting while on the other it was daunting. It was exciting because I was working with a local film crew to capture footage for a film focused on the seals of Sable Island. At the core of the film is my hope to capture underwater footage of the behaviour of seals using a video camera mounted to the back of a seal. Yes, the seal will be working for us and showing us what they do out at sea. We deployed two cameras. The deployment of the cameras was the daunting part. I have attempted this several times now and either the seal decides it no longer wants to carry the camera on its back and removes it, or we get the camera back but there is no useable footage, or the seal simply decides not to return to the island and the camera falls off during their annual moult in May. So, four deployments to date and nothing to show for it. So that was the daunting part.

This is the video camera we will use to capture the life of the seal underwater. It will sit on the back of the seal and be programmed to turn on when the seal dives below 25 m during the night time, which is when the seal is most likely to be foraging.

So the exicitng part was shooting footage for the film. I have spent a lot of time capturing images of wildlife through my camera so I was thrilled to see how different it is to observe and capture wildlife on video.

One of the cameras that we will be using is below. Looks like a beast. It is sitting on a homemade sand sledge that we pushed along on the beach to get close to the seals.

Well I will post more later with updates on the working seals.

Damian