Fur seal

“ But America also has is successful dyers of seals, one of the most important of the results they have achieved, being the giving of the fur seal a fine brown colour, without injuring or burning the fur, while leaving the pelt soft, light, and durable. ”

“ Now wise and needed laws protect the Fur Seals on their breeding grounds, which are certain islands in the Far North. The young of all members of this family are born on shore, but soon take to the water. The Fur Seal migrates just as the birds do, but always returns to the place of its birth. Man and the Polar Bear are its enemies on land and ice, and the Killer Whale in the water. Mr. Fur Seal always has many wives and this is true of the other members of the Sea Lion family and of the Walrus. The males are three or four times the size of the females. ”

“ Owing to the fact that they do not swim at depth, the food of the fur seal is taken from the surface. Small fish and squid make up the bill of fare; and they remain in the water until their food is digested. The nursing fur seal rarely feeds any but its own "pups"; and, despite the tricks of the orphans to steal a bit of milk, they are ever on the alert. She has the greatest affection for her own offspring; but is positively savage in the way she treats any other. They are easily fatigued when on land, and often become overheated ”

“ How the cormorants dive and fish in it, how the gull tears at the drifted carcase of its kind, how the puffins, in ceaseless flight between ocean and their myriad burrows, arch and dome it in! Oh, it is a fine apartment! Its portals on either side are columns of spouting foam, and beyond lies the wild, houseless sea. A seal's dormitory!—how well do the wild things choose! So here, at once, one learns something different to what one is told. Seals care nothing about tides when they can get great slanting slabs that lie high and dry above them. ”

“ As a matter of fact the greatly depleted condition of the herd of fur seals is due to an entirely different cause fully demonstrated and easily understood.
The fur seal gets all its food in the open sea at great distances from land. It resorts to the land only to bring forth and nourish its young to self-dependence. ”

“ SEALS AND SEAL-SKINS
As it is as essential for those who wish to follow this story understandingly to know something of the fur-seal—its haunts, habits, and the methods of its capture—as it was to Phil Ryder, let us anticipate by a few hours the information that Serge is to give him, and learn a few of these things for ourselves.
Most of us have seen seals either in salt-water harbors or coast inlets, or at least in the tanks of zoölogical gardens; but the animals we have thus seen are hair-seals, which are so common as to be found in all the salt-waters of the world from poles to tropics. ”

“ I do not think a seal’s range of vision on land, or out of the water, is very great. I have frequently experimented with adult fur-seals, by allowing them to catch sight of my person, so as to distinguish it as of foreign character, three and four hundred paces off, taking the precaution of standing quietly to the leeward when the wind was blowing strong, and then walking unconcernedly up to them. ”

“ The animal famous for yielding the valuable fur, called seal-skin, is not a true seals but a kind of sea-lion with ears and more flexible limbs. The true seals have no external ears and their hind limbs are closely united together, being useless on land but very effective in water. The hind limbs of the sea-lions are separated, and are used by the animal when on land. All kinds of seals come on the land or on ice in great numbers during the breeding-season. The true seals vary from four to eight feet in length. Their fur is stiff, and they lack the woolly under fur of the fur-seals. ”

“ In the British Museum there is the skin of a very young Seal, which was presented by Sir John Richardson as the Falkland Island Fur-Seal, with the observation appended that the adult is 5 feet long, and its skin is worth fifteen dollars. It is without its skull. The fur of this young Seal is dark brown, reddish beneath, and very like that of the young specimen sent by Capt. Abbott; but the hairs are smoother, and the white tips to them are longer and more marked, giving the animal a more grizzled appearance. ”

“ With an exception of the pups, the fur-seal seems to have very little rest, awake or sleeping. Perpetual motion is well-nigh incarnate with its being. I naturally enough, when beginning my investigation of these seal-rookeries, expected to find the animals subdued at night, or early morning, on those breeding grounds ”

“ Seals and their Pups.—A fur seal has none of the altruistic instincts of some other animals, for it will never feed any pup but her own. Not a very affectionate mother at best, she yet unerringly knows her nursling's voice, and he in turn learns to find her. When they meet and recognize each other at meal time, it is easy to see that they belong together. ”

“ Also, though he often pegtops it, he has never yet pointed his nose straight up into the sky, which my bottle-nosed seal invariably does. Generally he soon adopts the horizontal attitude, and continues in it for the rest of the time he is up. When he goes down, he rolls round, as well as over—by which I mean both like a porpoise and like a barrel—and then his spotted, or rather blotched, belly makes a splendid mosaic under the water, for it is not only itself, which were enough of beauty, but the most lovely glaucous green is flung upon it, through which, all glorified, the pattern appears. ”

“ The seal stretches his head above the waves, not comprehending what has disturbed the repose of his asylum, while the rapacious skua pursues the puffin and gull. High in the air the birds seem like bees clustering about the rocks, whilst lower they fly past so close that they might be knocked down with a stick. ”

“ I well remember the first seal I shot. I had landed on the weather-side of a small island. A cautious reconnoitring discovered a good-sized seal ‘lying up’ on a detached rock. Then I commenced the stalking, closely followed by my dog. But ere I could approach within range, one of those seal-sentinels and provoking tormentors of the seal-hunter, a herring gull, set up his wild warning scream. The seal perfectly understood what it meant, at once took the alarm, plunged into the water, and disappeared. ”

“ Laws have now been made to help protect the poor fur Seal from its merciless hunters. It lives in cold seas where its deep rich coat is a splendid protection. No finer fur is there for keeping out cold and wet ”

“ From the ages of one to four years fur seals are extremely playful. They are marvelous swimmers, and frolic about in pursuit of one another, now diving deep, and then, one after the other, suddenly leaping high above the surface in graceful curves, like porpoises. ”

“ In the first place, the sexes of the hair or common seal are the same size, not like the fur [Pg 83] seal, where the sea-catch is four or five times bigger than the female. Then they don't breed in harems and the male hair seal does not stay on shore. A fur seal swims with his fore flippers, a true seal with his hind flippers. A fur seal stands upright on his fore flippers, a hair seal lies supine. A fur seal has a neck, a hair seal has practically none. A fur seal naturally has fur, the hair seal has no undercoat whatever. A pup fur seal is black, a pup hair seal is white. ”

“ An occasional seal, that put up its half-human head to peer at us, or a sparrow or butterfly, that hovered about us when we neared the shore, or now and then a flock of water-fowl, were the only living things we saw. ”

“ When the herds enter Bering Sea, about the end of June, nearly every female seal is with young. After the long voyage of two or three thousand miles through the heavy, boisterous waters of the North Pacific, they are naturally tired when they reach these breeding-grounds, and iii a condition in which they are an easy prey to the unscrupulous hunter. Even if every such female seal which is killed were secured, it is clear that two seal lives would be destroyed for the sake of a single sealskin. ”

“ Their mere ways of moving must often be infinite joys to them, seeing that besides the motion itself—as with this seal, the gnu, or the springbok, the half-flying arboreal monkey, or the soaring bird—there is the ecstasy of perfect health and strength and the freedom of perfect nudity—absolute disencumbrance. ”

“ At length, with a mighty yawn and stretch, he turns full upon his vasty stomach, and immediately, by virtue of the different appearance which his fur has when wet or dry, becomes a much smaller seal that « 326 » has climbed up upon a buoy—the lower, wet part of him looks like that; the upper, alone, is himself. Then gradually he soaks all over, till he is, again, huge and indivisible, a great, naked, blue, greasy, oiled bladder,—yet firm still, as though he grew to the rock. ”

“ The finest quality of seal-skin in the eastern North American waters, which are devoid of fur seal, is that of the kos-se-gear, or fresh-water seal, which is found at or near the mouths of nearly all rivers emptying into the sea. ”

“ They are therefore called Fur-Seals by the sealers, and are hunted for their skin as well as for their oil. The quantity and fineness of the under-fur differ in the various species; and the skin and under-fur bear a price in the market according to the country and the species from which they are obtained.
Some species of the family have so little under-fur when they arrive at adult age, that they are of no value in the market to be made into “seal-skins;” these are therefore called Hair-Seals by the sealers. They are only collected for the oil, as the skins are of comparatively little value. ”

“ A seal comes to its rock there before the tide has sufficiently gone down to let it lie upon it. It plays about the rock, fawns upon it, caresses it, woos it, one might say, dives down and circumnavigates it, tries or pretends to try to lie upon it, even under the water, swims away and returns, and does the same thing several times; and as soon as the water is sufficiently shallow to allow of it, it reclines, sea-washed and gently heaving, till the receding tide leaves it high and dry. A pretty thing it is—very—to see a seal thus waiting for its chosen rock to appear. ”

“ But after all, any phocine ambition, either for extinction or higher evolution, may be an empty thing; because the seal is very comfortable as he is. Consider a few of his [Pg 137] advantages. He has a very fine fur overcoat, with an admirable lining of fat, which, as well as being warm, permits any amount of harmless falling and tumbling about, such as is suitable to and inevitable with the seal's want of shape. He can enjoy the sound of bagpipes, which is a privilege accorded to few. Further, he can shut his ears when he has had enough, which is a faculty man may envy him. ”

“ Under these laws only one company, which pays handsomely for the privilege, may kill seals on these islands, and even it may only kill a specified number of young males between one and six years of age. Thus the old bulls, the females, and the pups are never molested.
On this little group of fog-enshrouded islands does [71] the fur-seal breed, and to them the vast herds return year after year with the regularity of the seasons themselves. ”

“ No notable changes in the habits of the fur seal have resulted from any action of man. It is not possible for man to drive away the fur seals from any of their haunts except by killing them all. Pelagic sealing, in the opinion of the International Commission, headed by Professor David Starr Jordan, was the sole cause of the continued decline in fur-seal herds. The chief cause of death of the females on the rookeries is caused from the wrangling of the "bulls," and in the struggle of the reserve of idle "bulls" to steal "cows" from the> "harems." ”

“ When a seal scratches one of his front flippers it is wonderfully like a man scratching the back of one hand with the other. The hind feet can look almost more hand-like. It is true that when the toes are distended to their full width the whole foot is just like a fish's tail in shape, but when they are not stretched so widely apart, and those of the one play, as they often do, with those of the other, then they have a wonderful resemblance to fingers—swollen, gouty fingers, it is true ”

“ Their bed-times are not governed by the ebb and flow of the sea.
The larger seal which I spoke of yesterday is called here, locally, a bottle-nosed seal, or at least some so designate it. He is here again to-day, rising at intervals and staring at the sky, in the other of these two-in-one-contained bays, which seems to be more particularly his own. When he rises he remains for a full minute standing upright, as it were, in the water, with his muzzle about six inches above it and pointing straight into the sky. ”

“ And now, still more markedly than yesterday, I note that the favourite attitude of a seal, when lying asleep or dozing, is either on its back or half or three-quarters rolled over towards it. Out of all these twelve, only one lies in the way that all illustrations persist in depicting them as lying. Three are absolutely on their backs, with their faces, or rather chins, looking, for long periods, straight up into the sky ”

“ This was a delightful experience to the ferryman, and the sight of the dog-like creature swimming after the boat was also an entertainment to the passengers and a cause of surprise to many. But there was nothing remarkable in its action; the seal, like the dog, is a social creature; it is well known that he readily grows tame towards, and even attached to, the human beings he is accustomed to see who do not persecute him. ”