In this ridiculously cute video, New Zealand resident Annette Swoffer comes home to find an unexpected visitor asleep on her couch: a baby seal.
"I thought 'I'm hallucinating, this is just wrong,'" Swoffer told the New Zealand Herald. "Then it looks at me with those huge brown eyes. It was so cute."
The baby fur seal, nicknamed "Lucky," reportedly wandered in from the bay waterfront, through a residential area, across several busy roads, into the house through a cat door and finally up a flight of stairs before coming to rest on Swoffer's couch.
New Zealand Department of ConservationAfter finding the baby seal, Swoffer put in a call to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). "They were giggling away and I'm saying 'I'm not drunk, I'm not lying, there's a seal in my house,' " Swoffer said. After she had convinced SPCA officials of the authenticity of her story, the group contacted the Department of Conservation. Biodiversity program manager Chris Clark told Swoffer he'd been looking for the missing seal pup all afternoon after it had stumbled into a private garden, apparently startling some of the home's elderly residents.
In an email to the Huffington Post, Department of Conservation's Katrina Knill went into more detail about why the baby seal may have made its unusual journey to Swoffer's couch:
At this time of year, young seals are dispersing from the rookeries. Seal pups may often spend days at a time alone, whilst the mother is away foraging for food.
Seals usually occupy rocky shores in places that have some protection from heavy seas and are often found resting on Bay of Plenty beaches. Occasionally they travel inland (usually via estuaries and waterways). When on land they can become disoriented and have been found on previous occasions in unexpected places such as backyards, drains and streets.
Lucky has since been returned to his natural habitat.
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