During a recent walk around the base of Mount Maunganui, we stopped for a picnic lunch and, while enjoying a fresh baguette and cheese, noticed that some of the rocks were furry and resolved into basking New Zealand Fur Seals. Closer inspection showed a group of at least 8 seals (all females apart from one male and a pup) hauled out on a rock across a gully. I was testing a 70-200 f2.8 with 2x teleconverter on the D800 which was reasonable but not ideal and managed a few acceptable shots but was keen to try and do better so headed back a couple of days later with the 200-400 and got a few more shots but nothing quite like I had wanted. A couple of weeks later, when Edin was home, we took another trip and as she had laid claim to the 200-400 I used the 500 to chase some Welcome Swallows while waiting for some seal action. As we arrived we saw the male in the water just as he was departing to forage for a feed. There seemed to be only one other seal visible and later inspection of our photos showed that she had a damaged left eye. Unfortunately we found a dead pup on the beach and I hoped that it wasn’t the youngster I had photographed previously. See Edin’s blog post for her images from this trip.

After an hour or so the male seal returned and hauled out onto the rocks and made a good subject as he shook the water from his pelt and settled in to bask in the sun. The sun was high in the sky and behind him with some passing cloud cover. With cloud diffusing the light but some backlight gave nice definition of the drying fur.

New Zealand Fur Seals are the most common seals around New Zealand and can be found anywhere around the coast and as far afield as Tasmania, Eastern and Western Australia. They forage mainly on squid and small water fish can can also take larger fish such as conger eels and barracuda. They dive deeper than any other fur seal and can go deeper than 200m in search of prey. For more information see this Department of Conservation page.