January’s wicked weather was not kind to the local elephant-seal population. Huge waves and powerful tides slammed mothers and their newborns on California’s beaches – many pups are thought to have died. The good news is a lot of pregnant seals seem to have ridden out the storms at sea and are finally coming onto land to give birth.
At the Point Reyes National Seashore, there’s a large pile-up of cows, pups and expectant mothers on Drakes Beach. It’s a great time to observe the delightfully named “peak of pupping,” says Sarah Codde, a marine ecologist at the national seashore.
“We have set up designated elephant-seal viewing areas for the public to watch all the action that takes place in an elephant seal rookery,” she says. “They might see adult females give birth (peak of pupping is later this week and into next week) and they will definitely see pups nursing and bonding with their moms. They might see males fighting with each other, as the males compete for dominance over this group of females. In the weeks to come, the public will be able to see the weaned pups, which will stick around until late April.”
It’s also a rare chance to observe females give birth or interact with pups conveniently in front of the Kenneth Patrick Visitor Center at Drakes Beach. That’s only happened a couple of years in recent memory – usually males take up that real estate.
Folks who want to seal-watch should stay within the designated viewing areas and keep their voices low, as moms and pups are close to the parking lot. That parking lot is open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; more information about viewing the seals is available at the website of the national seashore.
In the weeks to come, biologists will monitor how the powerful storms might have affected the local seals’ mortality. Here’s Codde with some more info:
Many females might have stayed offshore while the bulk of the storms were happening and waited to haul out until after the storms ended. The storms hit early in the pupping season, so we didn’t lose a lot of pups, since many of them weren’t born yet. But of the pups that were born before/during the storms, we lost a high percentage. It’s tough to know how many pups were lost, but my guess is around 50 – 100 pups. As comparison, last year we had about 1,300 pups born at Point Reyes. The peak of pupping is usually the last week of January and first week of February, so we’ll see if that ends up being the same, once we get through the next few weeks and can look at the counts of seals.
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