Inishkea, Ireland. January 1998

Skeletons of small stone houses over a crescent of white sand beach. A dark stone pier. Through clear seawater, grey rock. Algae in shades of dark green, lilting. A low hill. Grass, scrub, sporadic sheep. An Irish island, deserted seven decades.

Richard angles into the tiny bay, slows. The pontoon kisses rock, Pete and I hop onto the pier, tie off. The RIB – Rigid-hulled Inflatable Boat - fibreglass hull, inflated rubber fenders – is snugged in. Richard passes up our packs, we throw them on, trudge up the hill to the birder's hut.


The hut, a small prefab steel box – straight lines in reds and black - modernity, stands separate, uphill from from the greybrown stone of dead houses. Ugly, but a roof, stove, bunks - shelter for the three of us. We dump the packs, trudge back. We're already wearing our drysuits. The trip from Aghleam, the nearest village, had been a little wet.

Time for work.

We cast off, head for the other islands. Richard drives, standing at the centre console, squinting into the wind, his face an array of sharp angles. He's almost the Discovery Channel cutout of a field biologist – compact, fit, broad shouldered. Self-contained. From our shared months of fieldwork back in Australia, I'm comfortable. Richard has his act together. Pete, I don't know. He's dark Irish, smiling, dishevelled, the first small hints of a beer gut starting to press his drysuit.

We reach our first islet. The seals are cautious, as they should be. Richard slows the boat, we circuit, keeping our distance. Heads pop up from rocks, curious, watching. We edge in, counting seals as they appear. The boat enters the seals' perimeter, one seal decides we're too close, and the rush is on. We tally the splashes as they galoomph across the last few yards of rock, slip into the water. Once swimming, safe, they watch some more, almost-doggy faces bopping damp around us. We compare numbers.

Now the fun starts. The counts are for Pete's research – population ecology, habitat use. Time for Richard's project – diet.

We're working from a RIB, so Richard can't drive up onto the rocks for us to clamber ashore and stay dry. Rocks and fibreglass don't mix. Were we using a normal inflatable boat, we could, as is standard practice for the science of seal poo-collection. But we're working from islands that are just too far offshore for a standard inflatable. It'd be safe enough for the between-island hops, such as the ones we were making today – but getting to and from Inishkea – the island where we were overnighting - wouldn't be an option, except in perfectly calm seas. Perfectly calm seas aren't all that common here, hence the RIB. And the swim.

I ease into the water, release the pontoon, fin towards the islet, keeping my hands and face clear. It's only thirty yards or so, but this is northwest Ireland in winter. I'm wearing thermal underwear beneath my borrowed drysuit. Even so, the seawater through my wetsuit booties tells me more than I hoped to know about temperature. A pinhole reveals itself in an arm and my drysuit becomes a dampsuit. Seeping seawater reaches my armpit, just so I can truly appreciate a January dip in the North Atlantic. I lift my hands a little further out of the water. Pete fins beside me holding a net and watertight bag.

Fins scrape bottom, we waddle ashore backwards, cautious on the dark, slippery rock. We sit, remove our fins, walk like humans. The seals have left the islet empty. They don't mind the water temperature.

We wander the rocks, collecting samples of faeces for Richard's project. Turn a plastic bag inside out around my hand, bend over, pick up a faecal pie. Just like cleaning up after a dog. But we mark our bags with dates and numbers, record the position. And if two are close together, looking similar (it's easy to develop an eye for poo) - well, Richard insists we collect only one of them. Otherwise, we'd commit one of the worst sins in ecological research: pseudoreplication - assuming that samples are independent when they may not be. More prosaically, maybe a seal shat, moved a little, then shat again. Or maybe it rolled in its shit.

Seals do that.