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Startled seal takes flight and leaps onto woman’s roof

(Anne McCaw)

Imagine you walk out to your garden and there’s a seal just hanging out. Now imagine it gets startled when it spots you and jumps onto the roof of a nearby shed to hide.

Crazy, right? Well it turns out, not completely farfetched according to Ann McCaw, property manager at a heritage home museum in Kaikoura, New Zealand.

“He was in the front garden. We both startled each other,” McCaw told the Sunday Star Times. “He took off along the side of the house, he took a left and jumped onto the roof.”

In fairness, the distance from roof to ground on the side the seal is reported to have leapt from is only two feet.

“I thought to myself, my goodness, I’ve got a seal on the roof, this is unreal,” McCaw told the paper. “He looked very happy. He was just looking out to sea, just doing a classic seal pose.”

The seal reportedly spent 20 minutes on the metal roof before McCaw was able to shoo it away from the larger drop on the other side of the building and back off the roof to safety.

It wasn’t McCaw’s first run in with a seal on the property, she told the Star Times a large bull seal had to be herded out of another garden on one occasion by a neighbour on a bike sounding a horn, and on another occasion she found a seal asleep on the door mat out front.

As for this seal, McCaw said she’s just glad she was able to keep it from jumping off one of the higher sides of the building.

“I was really concerned he would jump off,” she said. “Had he jumped off he would have been seal pâté.”