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| Oregon Coast Today photo taken Sunday, March 16, 2008 at the Salishan Spit. |
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‘If you love someone, set them free...’
If you love seal pups, Let them be.
By Niki Price
Oregon Coast Today
[Published March 21, 2008]
Are you a mammal? I thought so. You were born alive, breathe air, grow body hair — some more than others, of course — and have at least a little backbone. And, thanks to Mother Nature, you have an instinctive desire to help a baby.
It’s all part of evolutionary biology. Because newborn mammals cannot survive without help, adult mammals are programmed to respond to the sight and sound of an infant. We show preference for our own kind, of course, but almost any baby mammal has the power. It could be a 10-ounce kitten or a 350-pound baby elephant. If the creature has big eyes and makes a plaintive cry, we are somehow driven to hold it, feed it, wrap it up in a blanket and tell it everything will be OK.
But when it comes to harbor seal pups, you need to turn off the love. This innate behavior, this need to comfort the cute, is to blame for nearly all the dangerous things that people do to seal pups every spring. Humans on holiday find the pups resting on the beach, waiting for their mothers to return, and try to help. Tourists have been known to feed these babies, still living on their mothers’ milk, picnic lunches of hot dogs and ocean water. People cover the pups with water, push them into the bays and sometimes even carry them back to their hotel rooms or cars.
These interventions do much more harm than good, said Jim Rice, coordinator of the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network, headquartered at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. During the spring “pupping” season, now through the end of April, the infant seals typically spend several hours on land, alone, each day.
“This is perfectly normal. Adult female seals spend most of their time in the water, hunting for food, and only come ashore periodically to nurse their pups,” Rice said. “But the mothers are shy and unlikely to rejoin their pups if there is activity nearby.” [Story continues below...]
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| OCT photo by Niki Price. |
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For the first four to six weeks, a pup relies exclusively on its
mother’s fatty, nutritious milk; some of them triple their birth
weights by the time they are weaned. Separate the little cutie from its
mother for a day or more, and the chances of their reunion — and the
offspring’s survival — are slim.
Things are tough enough for these
pups. They face natural predators, including orca whales and sharks, as
well as infection, disease, dehydration and starvation. Since many of
their colonies are found near well-populated areas, domestic dogs are
also a threat. Only half of harbor seals survive their first year.
“It’s tempting for the public to ‘rescue’ these pups,” Rice said, “but their best chance for survival is to be left alone.”
Encounters
between humans and harbor seals are frequent, in part, because the two
communities often share the shore. There are an estimated 23,000 harbor
seals in Oregon and Washington. Several hundred live in Siletz Bay, at
the south end of Lincoln City, and haul out on the sandy northern tip
of the Salishan Spit, less than a mile from a housing development and a
few hundred yards from the busy Taft Beach. Another group lives at the
southern end of the Bayshore Spit, in Waldport (although last winter’s
storms have eroded a significant patch of this habitat). Unlike other
marine mammals, such as the gray whale, harbor seals don’t migrate.
They can spend their entire lives, as long as 30 years, in the same
location.
These Oregon coast natives belong to the order Pinnipedia
(which translates as “winged feet”), aquatic carnivorous mammals with
all four limbs modified into flippers. They’re part of the family
Phocidae, or “true seals,” because they have small front flippers and
strong, graceful tails that make them nimble swimmers. Harbor seals
come in a variety of colors, from silver-gray to black to brown, but
they always have spots (even if they are hard to see). Because of this,
the animal most commonly found in Oregon, Phoca vitulina richardsi, is
sometimes called the leopard seal.
Harbor seals grow to 5 to 6
feet long and weigh as much as 300 pounds, eating sole, flounder,
sculpin, hake, cod, herring, salmon, octopus and squid. They can dive
for up to 40 minutes, to a depth of 1,500 feet, but most dives are far
shorter. They spend about half their time in the water, where they
sometimes sleep, and warm themselves on sandy beaches, mudflats and
offshore rocks.
Other pinnipeds, such as walruses and sea lions,
are agile on land because their front flippers still function as feet.
But harbor seals, with small and streamlined flippers, are amusingly
awkward. To move on land, they undulate their bellies like worms. When
threatened, their first response is to wiggle immediately into the
water, where they are much less vulnerable.
The eastern North
Pacific population of harbor seals (from Baja California, Mexico, to
Alaska) is around 330,000. They’re not classified as endangered, but
they are included in the Marine Mammal Protection Act. That means that
handling, feeding, transporting and harassing seals is not only
counterproductive, it’s a federal offense.
Most local efforts
focus on education, with volunteers like Sherri Dougan serving on the
front line. A former dental hygienist who retired to Waldport, she’s
been a member of the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network for nearly
three years. When the network’s office or the Oregon State Police
receive a report of a sick, dead or abandoned mammal, Dougan is often
the first authority on the scene.
As a network member, she records
and reports beached whales, dying sea lions and the like. During the
pupping season, which coincides with the spring vacations of Northwest
schools, most calls concern abandoned baby seals. She doesn’t mind
responding to the scene; in fact, sometimes she stays the whole day.
She posts warning signs, offers leaflets on the subject and tries,
politely, to keep people and their pets at least 100 yards away.
“I
would love to see fewer people out there bothering seal pups. That’s
what we work for, to educate people,” she said. “We’re not telling
people they can’t observe them or take pictures of them, but that they
need to keep their distance.”
Since 2006, Dougan has been working on
tourist education, distributing OMMSN brochures, information sheets and
window decals to the Waldport area vacation rental agencies and hotels.
“I really don’t think they’re trying to hurt the pups. They just
don’t have the information, so I share it with them,” she said. “I
always tell them, if you’re close enough for the seals to lift up their
heads and look at you, that’s too close. It stresses them out, and when
they’re stressed it’s not healthy for them.”
Occasionally, a report
of a stranded pup turns out to be the real thing: the mother never
returns or dies on the beach, or the youngster has a wound or illness
that prevents it from heading back into the water. Network members will
intervene if the animal is suffering or has a human-caused injury. In
most cases, though, they allow nature to take its course. The
population is not considered at risk and there is no official
rehabilitation facility available.
The decision not to act, to let
the animal die or survive on its own, is difficult for many beach
lovers to understand, Dougan said.
“Sometimes, people get upset
when we don’t do something for an injured animal, but that’s our
policy. It’s part of nature. Seals get sick. They get hurt. They die.
Some of the seal pups don’t make it.
“People don’t understand why we
don’t just take them to aquarium, just pick them up and take them to a
hospital or something. It’s easy to understand why they feel that way,
because those seal pups are so cute.”
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