At BDMLR Cornwall Seal Hospital our volunteer marine mammal medics care for sick and injured seal pups immediately following their rescue. Cornwall is one of our busiest regions in the country for calls to seal pups.
Since 2010, BDMLR have not only been rescuing pups from around the South West region, but also taking them into our own small hospital facility providing temporary, emergency care for seal pups, whenever the regions larger rehabilitation centres were full to capacity. These pups receive care until spaces open up for them to move on to further rehabilitationa nd release. The first few hours, days and weeks are critical to the survival of these pups.
Each pup’s care has always been under the direct supervision of veterinary surgeons experienced with seals, and supported by a fantastic community of dedicated and highly skilled volunteers who work tirelessly to ensure pups are kept comfortable, fed, and clean.
We admitted over 600 seal pups since we began back in 2010 and are extremely proud of what we have achieved over the years. As the numbers of callouts to seals continued to increase year on year, so did the number of pups requiring urgent care and during 2020 / 2021 pupping season alone we cared for 139 seal pups. This placed an enormous amount of pressure on our facility, with resources being stretched to their limits and volunteers working around the clock to keep our standards of care high.
With the onset of the COVID pandemic, we finally reached a critical point and realised that expansion was necessary, and so began to form our plans to build a brand new, purpose-built hospital in 2021.The new ‘BDMLR Cornwall Seal Hospital’ was opened in September 2021, after a mammoth effort to raise the required funds and complete the build in time for the start of the grey seal pupping season.
The new hospital has more than doubled our capacity, allowing us to care for up to 10 seal pups at a time. The pups are housed in a light, well-ventilated environment with spacious pens and individually controlled heats- allowing us to tailor the temperature to each pups needs. Cameras allow our veterinary team to monitor the pups even when off-site, and a new range of equipment (including blood machines, a microscope, and an ultrasound machine) have drastically increased our diagnostic capabilities in-house. This helps us to ensure each pup is getting the correct treatments that they require to recover.
We also now have a classroom that we can use for training volunteers, and giving talks and workshops to small groups. One of our aims is to be able to utilise the knowledge we have acquired from our 12 years of experience to help seal pups not only in the South-West but across the country by training key BDMLR volunteers from other areas.
Keeping our protocols up to date with the latest research is very important to us, and we regularly communicate with other seal rehabilitation facilities to ensure we maintain the very highest of standards.
Whilst the BDMLR Cornwall Seal Hospital is staffed by volunteers we have ongoing costs to keep the facility running - for instance providing essential medication and fish to feed our seal pups. We greatly appreciate all donations large and small. Please note, our facility’s sole purpose is as a working hospital and we aren’t able to accept visitors. However, you can follow our work and the pups on social media.