Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

That these animals are preyed upon extensively by killer-whales (Orca gladiator), in especial, and by sharks, and probably other submarine foes now unknown, is at once evident; for, were they not held in check by some such cause, they would, as they exist to-day on St. Paul, quickly multiply, by arithmetical progression, to so great an extent that the island, nay, Bering Sea itself, could not contain them. The present annual killing of one hundred thousand out of a yearly total of over a million males does not, in an appreciable degree, diminish the seal-life, or interfere in the slightest with its regular, sure perpetuation on the breeding-grounds every year. We may, therefore, properly look upon this aggregate of four and five millions of fur-seals, as we see them every season on these Pribylov Islands, as that maximum limit of increase assigned to them by natural law. The great equilibrium which nature holds in life upon this earth must be sustained at St. Paul as well as elsewhere.

Think of the enormous food-consumption of these rookeries and hauling-grounds; what an immense quantity of finny prey must pass down their voracious throats as every year rolls by! A creature so full of life, strung with nerves, muscles like bands of steel, cannot live on air, or absorb it from the sea. Their food is fish, to the practical exclusion of all other diet. I have never seen them touch, or disturb with the intention of touching it, one solitary example in the flocks of water-fowl which rest upon the surface of the water all about the islands. I was especially careful in noting this, because it seemed to me that the canine armature of their mouths must suggest flesh for food at times as well as fish; but fish we know they eat. Whole windrows of the heads of cod and wolf-fishes, bitten off by these animals at the nape, were washed up on the south shore of St. George during a gale in the summer of 1873. This pelagic decapitation evidently marked the progress and the appetite of a band of fur-seals to the windward of the island, as they passed into and through a stray school of these fishes.

How many pounds per diem is required by an adult seal, and taken by it when feeding, is not certain in my mind. Judging from the appetite, however, of kindred animals, such as sea-lions fed in confinement at Woodward’s Gardens, San Francisco, I can safely say that forty pounds for a full-grown fur-seal is a fair allowance, with at least ten or twelve pounds per diem to every adult female, and not much less, if any, to the rapidly growing pups and young “holluschickie.” Therefore, this great body of four and five millions of hearty, active animals which we know on the Seal Islands, must consume an enormous amount of such food every year. They cannot average less than ten pounds of fish per diem, which gives the consumption, as exhibited by their appetite, of over six million tons of fish every year! What wonder, then, that nature should do something to hold these active fishermen in check.[132]

During the winter solstice—between the lapse of the autumnal and the verging of the vernal equinoxes—in order to get this enormous food-supply, the fur-seals are necessarily obliged to disperse over a very large area of fishing-ground, ranging throughout the North Pacific, five thousand miles across between Japan and the Straits of Fuca. In feeding, they are brought to the southward all this time; and, as they go, they come more and more in contact with those natural enemies peculiar to the sea of these southern latitudes, which are almost strangers and are really unknown to the waters of Bering Sea; for I did not observe, with the exception of ten or twelve perhaps, certainly no more, killer-whales, a single marine disturbance, or molestation, during the three seasons which I passed upon the islands, that could be regarded in the slightest degree inimical to the peace and life of the Pinnipedia; and thus, from my observation, I am led to believe that it is not until they descend well to the south of the Aleutian Islands, and in the North Pacific, that they meet with sharks to any extent, and are diminished by the butchery of the killer whales.

But I did observe a very striking exhibition, however, of this character one afternoon while looking over Lukannon Bay. I saw a “killer” chasing the alert “holluschickie” out beyond the breakers, when suddenly, in an instant, the cruel cetacean was turned toward the beach in hot pursuit, and in less time than this is read the ugly brute was high and dry upon the sands. The natives were called, and a great feast was in prospect when I left the carcass.

But this was the only instance of the orca in pursuit of seals that came directly under my observation; hence, though it does undoubtedly capture a few here every year, yet it is an insignificant cause of destruction, on account of its rarity.

The young fur-seals going out to sea for the first time, and following in the wake of their elders, are the clumsy members of the family. When they go to sleep on the surface of the water, they rest much sounder than the others; and their alert and wary nature, which is handsomely developed ere they are two seasons old, is in its infancy. Hence, I believe that vast numbers of them are easily captured by marine foes, as they are stupidly sleeping, or awkwardly fishing.

I must not be understood as saying that fish alone constitute the diet of the Pribylov pinnipeds; I know that they feed, to a limited extent, upon crustaceans and upon the squid (Loligo), also eating tender algoid sprouts; I believe that the pup-seals live for the first five or six months at sea largely, if not wholly, upon crustaceans and squids; they are not agile enough, in my opinion, to fish successfully, in any great degree, when they first depart from the rookeries.

In this connection I wish to record an impression very strongly made upon my mind, in regard to their diverse behavior when out at sea away from the islands, and when congregated thereon. As I have plainly exhibited in the foregoing, they are practically without fear of man when he visits them on the land of their birth and recreation; but the same seal that noticed you with quiet indifference at St. Paul, in June and July, and the rest of the season while he was there, or gambolled around your boat when you rowed from the ship to shore, as a dog will play about your horses when you drive from the gate to the house, that same seal, when you meet him in one of the passes of the Aleutian chain, one hundred or two hundred miles away from here, as the case may be, or to the southward of that archipelago, is the shyest and wariest creature your ingenuity can define. Happy are you in getting but a single glimpse of him, first; you will never see him after, until he hauls out, and winks and blinks across Lukannon sands.

But the companionship and the exceeding number of the seals, when assembled together annually, makes them bold; largely due, perhaps, to their fine instinctive understanding, dating, probably, back many years, seeming to know that man, after all, is not wantonly destroying them; and what he takes, he only takes from the ravenous maw of the killer-whale or the saw-tipped teeth of the Japan shark. As they sleep in the water, off the Straits of Fuca, and the northwest coast as far as Dixon’s Sound, the Indians belonging to that region surprise them with spears and rifle, capturing quite a number every year, chiefly pups and yearlings.