Christmas Day at Winterton

Drove down to Winterton this morning with my family. Huge numbers of people on the beach - I was hoping for fewer people of Christmas Day when everyone's supposed to be at home with family etc. I wanted to show my children some Grey Seal families, but we were disappointed to discover lots of mess and distress there. This is the sensitive period, when the cubs are still 'not allowed' in the water by their mothers, and are supposed to stay in the dunes. Today we saw several cubs 'trapped' between the waves and the dunes where they were being harassed by idiots and their dogs. I think that at Horsey there are some regulations regarding walking dogs on the beach at this time of year, but at Winterton there was not even a sign to ask people not to behave like assholes. I did my best to talk to people and explain the sensitivity, and I kept a safe distance myself (luckily I have a big lens; most other mortals have phone-cameras), but the beach there needs to be better managed. Today was a bad day for cubs there.

Poor mother - look at this distressed impression on her face:

Not too many birds at sea - some distant Red-throated Divers, one Fulmar and that's it.