Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

A vivid realism of the fact that often truth is far stranger than fiction is strikingly illustrated in the life-history of the fur-seal: as it is the one overshadowing and superlatively interesting subject of this discussion, I shall present all its multitudinous details, even at the risk of being thought tedious. That aggregate of animal life shadowed every summer out upon the breeding grounds of the Seal Islands is so vast, so anomalous, so interesting, and so valuable, that it deserves the fullest mention; and even when I shall have done, it will be but feebly expressed.

THE HARBOR SEAL

Adult Male and Female Young, 2 months

[Phoca vitulina: a Life Study made at Zapadnie, St. Paul’s Island. July 10, 1872]

Great as it is, yet a short schedule[107] embraces the titles of all the pinnipeds found in, on, and around the island-group. Of this list the hair-seal[108] is the animal which has done so much to found that erroneous popular and scientific opinion as to what a fur-seal appears like. Phoca vitulina has, in this manner, given to the people of the world a false idea of its relatives. It is so commonly distributed all over the littoral salt waters of the earth, seen in the harbors of nearly every marine port, or basking along the loneliest and least inhabited of desolate coasts far to the north, that everybody has noticed it, if not in life, then in its stuffed skins at the museums, sometimes very grotesquely mounted. This copy, set everywhere before the eye of the naturalist, has rendered it so difficult for him to correctly discriminate between the Phocidæ and the Otariidæ, that the synonymy of the Pinnipedia has been expanded until it is replete with meaningless description and surmise.

Although the hair-seal belongs to the great group of pinnipeds, yet it does not have even a generic affinity with those seals with which it has been so persistently grouped, namely, the fur-seal and the sea-lion. It no more resembles them, than does the raccoon a black or grizzly bear.

I shall not enter into a detailed description of this seal; it is wholly superfluous, for excellent, and, I believe, trustworthy accounts have been repeatedly published by writers who have treated of the subject as it was spread before their eyes on the coasts of Labrador, Newfoundland, and Greenland; to say nothing of the researches and notes made by European scientists. It differs completely in shape and habit from its congeners on these islands. Here, where I have studied its biology, it seldom comes up from the water more than a few rods at the farthest; generally hauling and resting at the margin of the surf-wash. It takes up no position on land to hold and protect a family or harem, preferring the detached water-worn rocks, especially those on the lonely north shore of St. Paul, although I have seen it resting at “Gorbatch,” near the sea-margin of the great seal-rookery of that name, on the Reef Point of St. Paul; its cylindrical, supine, gray and white body marked in strong contrast with the erect, black, and ochre-colored forms of the Callorhinus, which swarmed round about it. On such small spots of rock, wet and isolated from the mainland, and in secluded places of the north shore, the “nearhpah” brings forth its young, a single pup, perfectly white, covered with long woolly hair, and weighing from three to seven pounds. This pup grows rapidly, and after the lapse of four or five months it tips the scales at fifty pounds; by that time it has shed its infant coat and donned the adult soft steel-gray hair over the head, limbs, and abdomen, with its back most richly mottled and barred lengthwise, by dark brown and brown-black streaks and blotches, suffused at their edges into the light steel-gray ground of the body. When they appear in the spring following, this bright gray tone to their color has ripened into a dingy ochre, and the mottling spread well over the head and down on the upper side or back of the flippers, but fades out as it progresses. It has no appreciable fur or under-wool. There is no noteworthy difference as to color or size between the sexes. So far as I have observed, they are not polygamous. They are exceedingly timid and wary at all times, and in this manner and method they are diametrically opposed, not by shape alone, but by habit and disposition, to the fashion of the fur-seal in especial, and the sea-lion. Their skin is of little value, comparatively, but their chief merit, according to the natives, is the relative greater juiciness and sweetness of their flesh, over even the best steaks of sea-lion or fur-seal pup meat.

One common point of agreement among all authors was, by my observations of fact, so strikingly refuted, that I will here correct a prevalent error made by naturalists who, comparing the hair-seal with the fur-seal, state that in consequence of the peculiar structure of their limbs, their progression on land is “mainly accomplished by a wriggling, serpentine motion of the body, slightly assisted by the extremities.” This is not so in any respect; for, whenever I have purposely surprised these animals, a few rods from the beach-margin, they would awake and excitedly scramble, or rather spasmodically exert themselves, to reach the water instantly, by striking out quickly with both fore-feet simultaneously, lifting in this way alone, and dragging the whole body forward, without any “wriggling motion” whatever to their back or posterior parts, moving from six inches to a foot in advance every time their fore-feet were projected forward, and the body drawn along according to the violence of the effort and the character of the ground; the body of the seal then falls flat upon its stomach, and the fore-feet or flippers are free again for another similar motion. This action of Phoca is effected so continuously and so rapidly, that in attempting to head off a young “nearhpah” from the water, at English Bay, I was obliged to leave a brisk walk and take to a dog trot to do it. The hind-feet are not used when exerted in this rapid movement at all; they are dragged along in the wake of the body, perfectly limp and motionless. But they do use those posterior parts, however, when leisurely climbing up and over rocks undisturbed, or playing one with another; still it is always a weak, trembling terrestrial effort, and particularly impotent and clumsy. In their swift swimming the hind-feet of Phocidæ evidently do all the work; the reverse is a remarkable characteristic of the Otariidæ.

These remarks of mine, it should be borne in mind, apply directly to the Phoca vitulina, and I presume indirectly with equal force to all the rest of its more important generic kindred, be they as large as the big maklok, Erignathus barbata, or less.