Love from Alaska: The Pribilofs!

Forgive me my inner geek - but I have a biology degree, and visiting the Pribilofs is almost as exciting as visiting the Galapagos!

For work (I seriously got paid to do this!) I got to travel to the islands of Saint Paul and Saint George. They are 800 miles in the middle of the Bering Sea, and are the fabled fur seal rookeries.

The history of the islands is intense, and sad. The US Fish and Wildlife Service operated a fur seal harvest until 1985(!) and coerced the local Aleut to work for them much as the previous Russian overlords had. There is a book called "Slaves of the Harvest" written by the people of Saint Paul that is a great overview.

A great local blog: http://jett4567.blogspot.com/

From my perspective I found both islands to be beautiful, bountiful, and full of really warm and friendly people. I saw more birds than I've ever seen in my life - and I was there well past the prime birding season. Many birds had moved on earlier in the month. BUT the seals were still there!

Seals are odd critters, to say the least. They have hind ends like dogs, but inside their skin. The walk awkwardly enough, until a bull seal invades another’s territory and then WHAM they are lightening fast! Their fins are shiny and strong on the front, and feathery and leathery on the back. They make noises like herds of sheep do - baaaaah, grrrrahhhhhhh, whoaghhhhhhh, and they smell, well, they smell rank! Musky, briny, definitely like no other smell I've smelled.

I think you could observe them for months and still not catch all the social dynamics. Especially because you can't observe their underwater behavior. The pups were mostly out in the ocean, traveling together in huge gangs, swirling, practicing observation, playing with seaweed fronds, and some sort of tag. I've observed a lot of mammals, and tag seems to be a universal game. Foxes, wolves, musk-ox, seals, moose, squirrels, I've seen them all play tag when young.

Bull seals section off the beach into small harems - and by observing the seals you can see exactly where the lines are, even though in a picture you couldn't tell the difference. A still photo doesn't show the bull circling the outer edge, pushing his ladies towards the middle, and challenging seals that cross his area to get to their own from the ocean. On Saint George we observed one bull (whom we nicknamed Henry) who was rampaging over the beach area, pushing his limits and confronting his own harem, along with all the others. I remember thinking that he was being really aggressive, more so than all the other bulls we'd observed.

The next day we went back to that beach, and Henry was all alone - no harem, a big wide space around him, and he was laid out on a rock like he had died. We cold see that he was breathing, but he had obviously gotton the short end of someone's flipper, and when he did finally get up he was very slow and sore looking, and barely moved at all. Interesting that none of the seals in his harem had stuck around. The big empty spot on the beach around him was strange - compared to the furry masses surrounding it.

Henry, on the day he was feeling poorly

Other things I noticed about the seals:
Some seals looked like they were crying - big drops of liquid would build up and roll off their eyes, tracking down their seal cheeks. Why the tears?
The seals were very thin - you could tell under their blubber layer they didn't have much reserves - but after talking to villagers it seems that they are at the end of their pupping season, and so have been on reduced rations while the pups were growing up enough to swim. We saw several pups still nursing - too cute for words!
Seals have amazing hearing. The seal viewing blind were more to discourage tourists from going right onto the beach. Every time we walked up, they had heard us coming from waaaay back. They have alarm calls that start at chuffs, and progress to heavy grunting if you get too close. Sometimes we'd pull up in the vehicle, and you could already hear them chuffing, even though we were more than a half mile away.
Seals puke on each other - not sure why, but seals like to upchuck, a lot. Enough that foxes make a good living sneaking down onto the beach, weaving around the seals, and gulping up their steaming fishy vomit. If the foxes are sneaky enough they don't get charged by the seals before finishing. If they are not sneaky the bulls run them off after just a bite or two.
Seals get dog diseases - these were the first two villages where there were NO dogs, and folks had cats - I know - cats in an Alaskan village. AMAZING. Apparently distemper and mange can hop from dogs to seals, so dogs have always been banned on these islands to preserve the furs...er...seals.
Seals are very limber - I saw seals laying on rocks in such a way that would make any Yoga instructor jealous. They bend every which way, and watching the pups slither and slide all over the volcanic rocks was heart stopping - they looked about ready to break their necks all the time!

I thought these were viewing or counting platforms, turns out they are killing platforms - relics of when the seals were still commercially harvested. Most of these structures were built in the 1970's