Within the past week Mark Gregory, BDMLR's Essex Assistant Co-ordinator, became the fourth person to have qualified as an Advanced Marine Mammal Medic. The others are Trevor Weeks, BDMLR National Co-ordinator, based in Sussex; Stephen March, also from Sussex; and Kenneth McKlennan, in north-east Scotland.
BDMLR's standard Marine Mammal Medic course is taken by some 500 people a year and, after 19 years in existence, the organisation has some 3000 rescue volunteers stationed around the country. In the main, operations involve the rescue and sometimes rehabilitation of whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals.
The recently introduced Advanced Marine Mammal Medic course brings together skills sufficient for an individual to be able to lead operations under widely varying conditions on any of the creatures likely to require assistance.
A rescue operation may have to be run out in the open water or, by extreme contrast, in a busy harbour. It could be on a remote shoreline inaccessible except by sea, or up a major river or minor creek.
The Advanced course requires candidates to prove, through attendance at rescues, that they can handle some twenty different types of seal and cetacean rescue operation; be able to organise a range of rehabilitation programmes; hold qualifications in first aid and as an RYA Level 2 boat handler; and take a written exam.
The course is run free by BDMLR, but candidates need to fund their own first aid and boat handling training.
The standard, one-day Marine Mammal Medic course costs ?60 to complete. The courses are run periodically through the year in different parts of the country. Details are available on the BDMLR website.
*A young seal rescued last week by BDMLR volunteers from Drigg beach in Cumbria is reported to be doing well under rehabilitation at a seal hospital in Norfolk. It was recovered in a weak condition and with injuries to its head, from being washed about on the rocks.
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