When the brief sub-antarctic summer comes to Enderby Island so too does the world’s rarest sea lion: Hooker’s sea lion.

This film records all the drama and tragedy of this animals short breeding season – the arrival and courtship of the adults – the bulls battling to become beachmasters and control a harem, the birth of the pups and the hazards they face before finally coming to terms with the ocean.

To make this film the crew had to learn the ways of the beachmasters in order to get close to the colony. They learnt how to adopt “submissive postures” – keeping lower than the bulls and respecting the invisible boundaries of their territories – learning that bulls fierce charges were bluffs and usually stopped at the boundary.