Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

You will notice that if you disturb and drive off any portion of the rookery, by walking up in plain sight, those nearest to you will take to the water instantly, swim out to a distance of fifty yards or so, leaving their pups behind, helplessly sprawled around and about the rocks at your feet. Huddled up all together in the surf in two or three packs or squads, the startled parents hold their heads and necks high out of the sea, and peer keenly at you: then, all roaring in an incessant concert, they make an orchestra to which those deep sonorous tones of the organ in that great Mormon tabernacle, at Salt Lake City, constitute the fittest and most adequate resemblance.

You will witness an endless tide of these animals travelling to the water, and a steady stream of their kind coming out, if you but keep in retirement and do not disturb them. When they first issue from the surf they are a dark chocolate brown-and-black, and glisten; but, as their coats dry off, the color becomes an iron-gray, passing into a bright golden rufous, which covers the entire body alike—shades of darker brown on the pectoral patches and sterno-pectoral region. After getting entirely dry, they seem to grow exceedingly uneasy, and act as though oppressed by heat, until they plunge back into the sea, never staying out, as the fur-seal does, day after day, and week after week. The females and the young males frolic in and out of the water, over rocks awash, incessantly, one with another, just as puppies play upon a green sward; and, when weary, stretch themselves out in any attitude that will fit the character of that rock, or the lava-shingle upon which they may happen to be resting. The movements of their supple spines, and ball-and-socket joint attachments, permit of the most extraordinary contortions of a trunk and limbs, all of which, no matter how distressing to your eyes, they seem actually to relish. But the old battle-scarred bulls of the harem stand or lie at their positions day and night without leaving them, except to take a short bath when the coast is clear, until the end of the season.

SEA-LION ROOKERY, AT TOLSTOI

A view of the great Sea-lion breeding ground under the high bluffs of St. George’s Island, between Garden Cove and Tolstoi Mees. June, 1873

When swimming, the sea-lion lifts its head only above the surface long enough to take a deep breath, then drops down a few feet below, and propels itself, for about ten or fifteen minutes, like a cigar-steamer, at the rate of six or seven knots, if undisturbed; but, if chased or alarmed, it seems fairly to fly under water, and can easily maintain for a long time a speed of fourteen or fifteen miles per hour. Like the fur-seal, its propulsion through water is the work entirely of its powerful fore-flippers, which are simultaneously struck out, both together, and back against the water, feathering forward again to repeat, while the hind flippers are simply used as a rudder oar in deflecting an ever-varying swift and abrupt course of the animal. On land its hind flippers are employed just as a dog uses its feet in scratching fleas—the long peculiar toe-nails thereof seeming to reach and comb those spots affected by vermin, which annoys it, as the fur-seal is, to a great extent, and causes them both to enjoy a protracted scratching.

Again, both genera, Callorhinus and Eumetopias, are happiest when the surf is strongest and wildest. Just in proportion to the fury of a gale, so much the greater joy and animation of these animals. They delight in riding on the crests of each dissolving breaker up to a moment when it fairly foams over iron-bound rocks. At that instant they disappear like phantoms beneath the creamy surge, to reappear on the crown of the next mighty billow.

When landing, they always ride on the surf, so to speak, to an objective point: and, it is marvellous to see with what remarkable agility they will worm themselves up steep, rocky landings, having an inclination greater than forty-five degrees, to flat bluff-tops above, which have an almost perpendicular drop to water.

As the sea-lion is without fur, its skin has little or no commercial value.[140] The hair is short, an inch to an inch and a half in length, being longest over the nape of the neck; straight, and somewhat coarse, varying in color as the season comes and goes. For instance, when the Eumetopias makes its first appearance in the spring and dries out after landing, it has then a light-brownish rufous tint, with darker shades back and under the fore flippers and on the abdomen. By the expiration of a month or six weeks, about June 15th, generally, this coat will then be weathered into a glossy rufous, or ochre yellow; this tinting remains until shed along by the middle of August, or a little earlier. After a new coat has fairly grown, and just before an animal leaves the island rookery in November, it is a light sepia or Vandyke brown, with deeper shades, almost black, upon its abdomen. The cows after shedding never color up so darkly as the bulls; but when they come back to the land next year they return identically the same in tinting; so that the eye, in glancing over a sea-lion rookery during June and July, cannot discern any dissimilarity in color, at all noteworthy, existing between the coats of the bulls and the cows; also, the young males and yearlings appear in that same golden-brown and ochre, with here and there an animal which is noted as being spotted somewhat like a leopard—a yellow rufous ground predominating, with patches of dark-brown, blotched and mottled, irregularly interspersed over the anterior regions down to those posterior. I have never seen any of the old bulls or cows thus mottled, and this is likely due to some irregularity of shedding in the younger animals; for I have not noticed it early in the season, and it seems to fairly fade away so as not to be discerned on the same animal at the close of its summer solstice. Many of the old bulls have a grizzled or “salt and pepper” look during the shedding period, which is from August 10th up to November 10th or 20th. The pups, when born, are a rich dark-chestnut brown. This coat they shed in October, and take one much lighter in its stead, still darker, however, than their parents.

The time of arrival at, stay on, and departure from the islands, is about the same as that which I have recorded as characteristic of the fur-seal; but, if a winter is an open, mild one, some of the sea-lions will frequently be seen about the shores during the whole year; and then the natives occasionally shoot them, long after the fur-seals have entirely disappeared. Again, it does not confine its landing to the Pribylov Islands alone, as the fur-seal unquestionably does, with reference to such terrestrial location in our own country. On the contrary, it is a frequent visitor to almost all of the Aleutian Islands: it ranges, as I have said before, over the mainland coast of Alaska, south of Bristol Bay, and about the Siberian shores to the westward, throughout the Kuriles and the Japanese northern waters.[141]