A seal pup that turned up on a farm road at Heddon Bush, about 15 minutes west of Winton, has been scooped up in a bedsheet and driven more than 50 kilometres back to the coast after a late-afternoon call to Southland District Council.

Council senior compliance officer Melissa Palmer took the call at 4.30pm on Wednesday 28 October, and said the call centre operator warned her it was a strange one. A man on a tractor had rung in after nearly running over the animal on the roadside.

A New Zealand fur seal sits upright in bull kelp on Bench Island, off Stewart Island, part of the Southland coastline the Heddon Bush pup was returned to. Photo: Pseudopanax / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
A New Zealand fur seal sits upright in bull kelp on Bench Island, off Stewart Island, part of the Southland coastline the Heddon Bush pup was returned to. Photo: Pseudopanax / Wikimedia Commons, public domain

"It was really bizarre," Palmer said in a council release on 29 October, recalling that she wondered whether she was hearing it right.

The driver told her that from a distance he could not tell whether it was a cat or a dog dragging its back legs, until he pulled up and realised he was looking at a seal. Unsure what else he could do, he herded the pup into a paddock, off the road, and then rang the council.

Palmer was only about 15 minutes away and went straight to the scene, calling her husband Shaun for help. Armed with a large sheet from home, the pair followed the pup through the paddock as it made for a shelter belt, watched by a herd of curious dairy cows.

She found the animal lying on bare dirt near the hedge, worn out rather than hurt. They rolled it into the sheet and carried it back to the truck.

Department of Conservation duty ranger Trevor Huggins assessed the pup's condition over the phone and advised Palmer to take it to Ōreti Beach, let it go as far along the sand as possible and well clear of people and dogs, then wait and watch until it had returned to the water. It did.

Huggins believes this was the same pup seen earlier in the week on a Drummond farm. The woman who reported it there lost track of it, and he suspects it slipped back into a creek and kept heading inland.

Seals showing up far from the sea is not unusual, Huggins said. Mothers leave pups on the beach while they go fishing, and the youngsters do not always stay put. This one had probably swum up the Ōreti River, turned into a side creek and then a drain, and climbed out onto farmland.

The fact it had survived on its own for days suggested it had been catching fish in the creek and was close to being weaned anyway, he said. He described the outcome as a good result and credited Palmer with a good rescue.

DOC's advice to anyone who finds a seal is to stay well back, keep dogs away from it, and never touch, feed or attempt to move it. Where a seal looks hurt, is in immediate danger or is posing a safety concern, call 0800 DOC HOT (0800 362 468).