I grew up hearing the sounds of tens of thousands of seals as I went to sleep every night and as I awoke every morning. I loved the sound of the seals. When I was a child, there were as many as 1.4 million fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. Eighty percent of the northern fur seals bred on the Pribilofs. The bull seals would arrive in May from the Bering Sea, where they stayed most of the year, to establish their territory and await the arrival of the females in June. They would never leave their territory, even for food, until they finished mating. When the females arrived, having spent the winter thousands of miles off the coast of southern California and Southeast Alaska, the bull seals would “grab” them, some as little as a fifth of the size of a bull, to be part of their harem, which during my childhood consisted of as many as one hundred females. Once a bull impregnated a female, the bull left its territory and went to sea to feed for the first time since its arrival.
Female seals have two uteruses, one to deliver a ten-pound pup and the other to become impregnated again about three days later. The pups congregate with other pups in the breeding rookery when their mothers venture out to forage. Upon return, the pup and female find each other among the thousands of fur seals through the sound each makes. The female is known to be out foraging for three to ten days, but in the Pribilofs the maximum was seven days before fur seals began declining in the 1970s.
Over time I learned a lot of the language of the northern fur seals. I knew the sounds of a bull seal mating, the warning roars as some bull seal’s territory was encroached upon by another bull, bull seals fighting, a bull seal alerting others that he is moving without threat to other bull seals, a seal awakened by surprise, the bleating of pups calling for their mothers, and a mother searching for her pup. All such sounds mixed into some kind of chaotic and rhythmic melody from every rookery day and night.
Growing up with the 1.4 million seals in the Pribilofs was magical and mysterious. I would watch the seals for hours either from the land, or when I was out with the men fishing for halibut. The seals are extremely agile, alert, and highly social animals, always in groups onshore or at sea. The prime breeding males had manes, just like lions or bears—in fact, they are known as “sea bears.” If you watch a seal run on land, its front and hind quarters move exactly as a bear would. Like a bear, the males are highly territorial and the females aggressively protect their young regardless of the source of danger. The prime males are as dangerous as any grizzly bear; no one messes with these males. They can move faster than any man over the rocks and within seconds can cause severe injury as they sink their canine teeth through flesh or fur with a viciously strong shaking action of their muscular necks. Fights between these males are frequent, intruding younger or older bulls are very likely to have large parts of their fur and skin ripped out by the prime males, and several bulls may attack an intruder together. Rarely, however, do such encounters end in the death of a territorial intruder.
At sea, the seals are a contrast to their lives onshore. Most of the time, the seals at sea are simply floating aimlessly or playing. They are not aggressive there except in the case of a bull seal chasing a reluctant female to mate in the water. They are unafraid of humans and can come up to the side of a boat, craning their necks high out of the water as they curiously stare at us. All seals move very quickly and gracefully in the water. I have always been amazed at the agility and flexibility of the seal’s body, as it twists and turns rapidly in an underwater ballet that is as graceful as anything anyone would hope to see in their lifetime. No one can tell me that seals don’t play. On certain types of stormy days, when the waves would break far from shore, the seals, young and old, would “catch a wave” and surf either on top of the wave or immediately inside the wave. I loved watching the silhouettes of seals inside the clear water of a steep wave. When the wave was expended or ready to break onshore, the seal would turn around and catch another wave offshore. Sometimes, under the right conditions, the seals would play like this for a better part of an hour. In the fall, I would watch the seal pups, born in June and July, play for hours at sea, finding and playfully shaking seaweed picked off the sea bottom, surfing on small waves, or chasing after other seal pups.
The only threats to the seals, besides humans, are the orcas and Steller sea lions, the latter of which are not like the gentler California counterpart. They are larger and much fiercer—the female is larger than the male and is responsible for finding food so that her pup can survive on her milk. One fall day I watched as a male and female transient orca pair moved up to the rocks along the rookery where seal pups were gathered in pods. Astonishingly, the orcas started “playing” with the pups. The orcas would nuzzle below the pup and gently toss the pup into the air. The pups would twist, nose down, back into the water, like some kind of Olympic diving-board exhibition. The pups obviously loved this play and gathered around the orcas to get “their turn” to be thrown into the air. Suddenly, as if a signal passed between the orcas, they simultaneously attacked the pups when their defenses were down. What pups survived, the sea lions would then chase in open water and eat when caught. That day, I saw at least a dozen seal pups eaten in a matter of a couple of minutes, two and three at a time.
More frequently, orcas at sea would stalk and even steer seals toward other waiting orcas. We could always tell when this had happened as there was the inevitable large circle of blood on the water surrounded by four or five orcas. We would never purposely dare to come into the circle of orcas when a seal was taken—many times a female orca and her calf would be feeding on the seal while at least two large male relatives would maintain patrol in an invisible defense perimeter around the vulnerable pair. One time, we accidentally wandered into this invisible perimeter in a skiff and soon after spotted two huge dorsal fins speeding toward our boat. The boat operator quickly started up his seventy-horse power outboard and headed in a 180-degree direction at maximum speed. We ran for ten minutes before stopping, when we didn’t see the flukes anymore in the direction we came from. We sighed in relief; however, the boat operator then looked below the outboard and saw the two huge males looking up at him. They had followed us to make sure we didn’t turn back. Once we were an adequate distance from the feeding area, they turned around and headed back to the female and her calf.
Today, sadly, there may be three to five females to the northern fur seal harem instead of a hundred, with many bulls, upon establishing territory, waiting in vain for a female. Northern fur seal numbers in the Pribilofs have declined over the past 30 years to about 450,000, probably due to climate changes affecting migration patterns, location of food, and availability of food sources; discarded plastics and rope wrapped around seals’ necks causing them to slowly choke to death or die of infection; and the likely contribution of commercial fishing by factory trawlers that target food sources eaten by the seals, sea lions, and seabirds of the Bering Sea.
Gone are the times I remember the most, when I would go to a rookery and see the seals by the tens of thousands.