Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

When the “holluschickie” are up on land they can be readily separated into their several classes, as to age, by the color of their coats and size, when noted: thus, as yearlings, two, three, four, and five years old males. When the yearlings, or the first class, haul out, they are dressed just as they were after they shed their pup-coats and took on the second covering, during the previous year in September and October; and now, as they come out in the spring and summer, one year old, the males and females cannot be distinguished apart, either by color or size, shape or action; the yearlings of both sexes have the same steel-gray backs and white stomachs, and are alike in behavior and weight.

Next year those yearling females, which are now trooping out with these youthful males on the hauling-grounds, will repair to the rookeries, but their male companions will be obliged to return alone to this same spot.

About the 15th and 20th of every August they have become perceptibly “stagey,” or, in other words, their hair is well under way in shedding. All classes, with the exception of the pups, go through this renewal at this time every year. The process requires about six weeks between the first dropping or falling out of the old over-hair and its full substitution by the new: this change takes place, as a rule, between August 1st and September 28th.

The fur is shed, but it is so shed that the ability of a seal to take to the water and stay there, and not be physically chilled or disturbed during its period of moulting, is never impaired. The whole surface of these extensive breeding-grounds, traversed over by me after the seals had gone, was literally matted with shedded hair and fur. This under-fur or pelage is, however, so fine and delicate, and so much concealed and shaded by the coarser over-hair, that a careless eye or a superficial observer might be pardoned in failing to notice the fact of its dropping and renewal.

The yearling cows retain the colors of the old coat in the new, when they shed for the first time, and so repeat them from that time on, year after year, as they live and grow old. The young three-year-olds and the mature cows look exactly alike, as far as color goes, when they haul up at first and dry out on the rookeries, every June and July.

The yearling males, however, make a radical change when they shed for the first time, since they come out from their “staginess” in a nearly uniform dark gray, and gray and black mixed, and lighter, with dark ochre to whitish on the upper and under parts, respectively. This coat, next year, when they appear as two-year-olds, shedding for the three-year-old coat, is a very much darker gray, and so on to the third, fourth, and fifth seasons; then after this, with age, they begin to grow more gray and brown, with a rufous-ochre and whitish-tipped “wig” on the shoulders. Some of the very old bulls change in their declining years to a uniform shade, all over, of dull-grayish ochre. The full glory and beauty of the seal’s mustache is denied to him until he has attained his seventh or eighth year.

The male does not get his full growth and weight until the close of his seventh year, but realizes most of it, osteologically speaking, by the end of the fifth; and from this it may be perhaps truly inferred that the male seals live to an average age of eighteen or twenty years, if undisturbed in a normal condition, and that the females exist ten or twelve seasons under the same favorable circumstances. Their respective weights, when fully mature and fat, in the spring, will, in regard to the male, strike an average of from four to five hundred pounds, while the females will show a mean of from seventy to eighty pounds.

The female does not gain a maximum size and weight until the end of her fourth year, so far as I have observed, but she does most of her longitudinal growing in the first two. After she has passed her fourth and fifth years, she weighs from thirty to fifty pounds more than she did in the days of her youthful maternity.[125] In the table of these weights given below it will be observed that the adult females correspond with the three years old males; also, that the younger cows weigh frequently only seventy-five pounds, and many of the older ones go as high as one hundred and twenty, but an average of eighty to eighty-five pounds is the rule. Those specimens just noted which I weighed were examples taken by me for transmission to the Smithsonian Institution, otherwise I should not have been permitted to make this record of their bulk, inasmuch as weighing them means to kill them; and the law and the habit, or rather the prejudice of the entire community up there, is unanimously in opposition to any such proceeding, for they never touch females, and never go near or disturb the breeding-grounds on such an errand. It will be noticed, also, that I have no statement of the weights of any exceedingly fat and heavy males which appear first on the breeding grounds in the spring; those which I have referred to, in the table above given, were very much heavier at the time of their first appearance, in May and June, than at the moment when they were in my hands, in July; but the cows, and the other classes, do not sustain protracted fasting, and therefore their avoirdupois may be considered substantially the same throughout the year.

Thus, from the fact that all the young seals and females do not vary much in weight from the time of their first coming out in the spring, till that of their leaving in the fall and early winter, I feel safe in saying that they feed at irregular but not long intervals, during this period when they are here under our observation, since they are constantly changing from land to water and from water to land, day in and day out. I do not think that the young males fast longer than a week or ten days at a time, as a rule.

By the end of October and November 10th, a great mass of the “holluschickie,” the trooping myriads of English Bay, Southwest Point, Reef Parade, Lukannon Sands, the table-lands of Polavina, and the mighty hosts of Novastoshnah, at St. Paul, together with the quota of St. George, had taken their departure from these shores, and had gone out to sea, feeding upon the receding schools of fish that were now retiring to the deeper waters of the North Pacific, where, in that vast expanse, over which rolls an unbroken billow, five thousand miles from Japan to Oregon, they spend the winter and the early spring, until they reappear and break up, with their exuberant life, the dreary winter-isolation of the land which gave them birth.