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Saturday 22 November 2008

Seals of Approval

Andrew Curry watches seals on the Pacific coast

During breeding season, guided tours of the elephant seal beaches leave several times an hour from a century-old whitewashed dairy barn overlooking the crashing surf of the Pacific. After a short hike across green meadows and past a small pond dotted with brown pelicans, I arrived at a small hut painted with elephant seals and a metal placard reading ‘Warning: Wild Elephant Seals. Stay Back 25 Feet.’

Fortunately, elephant seals are more interested in charging each other than humans. They spend eight lonely months a year at sea before hauling up on to California’s beaches from December to March each year. First to arrive are the males, who are filled with more testosterone than an East German athlete. Chests scarred by bloody battles with rival seals, they spend much of the winter in fat-rippling combat. Like human males, the fights stem from one of two causes — land or ladies.

As female seals begin lumbering ashore, the largest and most aggressive males gather dozens of them together into harems. At the height of breeding season, more than 2,400 females pack the beaches under the beady black eyes of a few hundred alpha males who weigh more than two tons each.

The most successful males will mate with 50 females during the winter months, each one losing a third of his body weight in the process — that is equivalent to shedding six large rugby players. No wonder few males survive more than one breeding season. The females, meanwhile, land on the beach heavily pregnant and eager to find a strong male to protect them. They ‘pup’ almost immediately. After nursing their babies for a month on milk that’s more than half fat, the mothers mate and head out to sea, leaving the hapless baby seals to learn how to swim and hunt on their own. ‘It’s really wonderful that people can see the animal’s whole life cycle in the wild, not in a zoo,’ an Año Nuevo State Park Ranger called Frank Balthis told me.

Just 50 years ago, Año Nuevo’s beaches were empty. Beginning in the 1800s, elephant seals all up and down the coast were killed en masse for their blubber, and by 1883 the species was considered extinct. But because a few were always out at sea, a tiny population — less than 100, experts now think — survived on remote islands off the coast of Baja, Mexico. When scientists located this last elephant seal colony in 1892, they promptly killed seven of them for the Smithsonian Institution’s collections.

Thankfully, despite the efforts of museum collectors and poachers, the colony survived long enough for the Mexican and American governments to recognise elephant seals as a protected species, and in the century since, they’ve made a remarkable comeback. From that single Baja population, there are now more than 150,000 of the ugly giants swimming in the Pacific — and flopping heavily ashore each winter from Baja to the northern California coast.

Año Nuevo’s annual open-air seal circus is immensely popular; the two-hour walking tours fill up months in advance, and local enthusiasts guide almost 50,000 people through the dunes to celebrate the elephant seal’s triumphant return from the brink of extinction.

Reservations Can Be Made By Calling The Año Nuevo SR Office: 001 916 638 5883.

More articles from: Andrew Curry | this section

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