I visited Cape Palliser in New Zealand many times over four months. I felt compelled to return time and time again, just to see how much the seal pups had grown since the last time I saw them.
At first, I thought I was going to photograph seals. What I actually ended up doing was sitting on rocks for long stretches of time, trying very hard to look uninteresting, completely absorbed.
Each time I arrived, I would pick my way across the rocks, find somewhere to sit, and watch the entire rock pool creche scatter. Small dark bodies would slip, splash and flop away in every direction, disturbed by the new, two-legged, arrival.
Then I sat still.
After a very short while, they would forget about me. One more brave than the others would appear from behind a rock. Then another. Then a third would launch itself into the pool with the confidence of something that had no understanding of either gravity or consequence.
Soon the place would erupt into busy-ness again.
The rock pools were their nursery, playground, canteen, and battleground. The adults were draped over the rocks or beach nearby, completely asleep, heavy and motionless in the sun. They looked, at times, less like responsible parents and more like the aftermath of some terrible seal-based accident.
The pups, meanwhile, were chaos.
They blew bubbles through their noses in the pools.
Then there were the tiny teefs, deployed with great seriousness against giant strands of seaweed.
They hauled themselves over rocks, fell off things, landed on each other, bit each other, screamed, and generally behaved like small creatures in a creche, and in possession of far too much energy
One sat relaxing on a rock, sleepy and peaceful, while another entered from the side with the unmistakable energy of disruption; “one second before disaster.” A fight was clearly imminent.
Elsewhere, three pups had slumped together, piled across a rock as if their batteries had simply run out halfway through a fight.
There were orange mouths open in the rock pools. There were whiskers and flippers and ridiculous, melodramatic, expressions. Pups draped backwards over rocks, sound asleep. Like they’d been felled by sleep in the middle of whatever they were doing. Small, sleek torpedoes in the water. Ungainly flopping over difficult rocks.
It was glorious.
The more time I spent with them, the more characterful they became and the more compelled I was to watch their antics. Or perhaps it was more that I began to notice. The hesitant ones. The bold ones. The one who seemed to have opinions. The ones who played until a mother called, and then paused, listening, before deciding whether obedience was strictly necessary.
As they grew, they became braver. They came closer, not with fear, but curiosity. A slow shuffle. A pause. A look. The sense of being inspected by something young and wild and not yet certain what I was, or what to make of me.
Then, from somewhere among the sleeping adults, a mother would call.
And back they would go.
My joy was in being forgotten. In sitting still long enough for the pups to return to their games, their squabbles, their bubbles, their seaweed, their small disasters, their unique brand of chaos.
They were oblivious. Playing.
Funny, noisy, curious, boisterous, ridiculous, alive.
And for a few months at Cape Palliser, I had the privilege of sitting among the rocks and watching them grow up.