USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 34
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given above it will be seen that 1,000,000 pups or young seals, in round numbers, are born upon these islands of the Pribylov group every year. Of this million, one-half are males. These 500,000 young males, before they leave the islands for sea during October and November, and when they are between five or six months old, fat, and hardy, have suffered but a trifling loss in numbers-say one per cent .- while on and about the islands of their birth, surrounding which and upon which they have no enemies whatever to speak of ; but after they get well down to the Pacific, spread out over an im- mense area of watery highways in quest of piscatorial food, they form the most helpless of their kind to resist or elude the murderous teeth and carnivorous attacks of basking sharks * and killer-whales. +
fatal epidemic among seals. It is not reasonable to suppose that the Priby- lov rookeries have never suffered from distempers in the past, or are not to in the future, simply because no occasion seems to have arisen during the com- paratively brief period of their human domination.
* Somniosus microcephalus. Some of these sharks are of very large size. and when caught by the Indians of the northwest coast, basking or asleep on the surface of the sea, they will, if transfixed by the natives' harpoons, take a whole fleet of canoes in tow and run swiftly with them several hours before exhaustion enables the savages to finally despatch them. A Hudson Bay trader, William Manson (at Fort Alexander in 1865), told me that his father had killed one in the smooth waters of Millbank Sound which measured twenty-four feet in length, and its liver alone yielded thirty-six gallons of oil. The Somniosus lies motionless for long intervals in calm waters of the North Pacific, just under and at the surface, with its dorsal fin clearly exposed above. What havoc such a carnivorous fish would be likely to effect in a "pod " of young fur-seals can be better imagined than described.
+ Orca gladiator. While revolving this particular line of inquiry in my mind when on the ground and among the seals, I involuntarily looked con- stantly for some sign of disturbance in the sea which would indicate the pres- ence of an enemy, and, save seeing a few examples of the Orca, I never de- tected anything. If the killer-whale was common here, it would be patent to the most casual eye, because it is the habit of this ferocious cetacean to swim so closely at the surface as to show its peculiar sharp dorsal fin high above the water. Possibly a very superficial observer could and would confound that long trenchant fluke of the Oreo with the stubby node upon the spine of a humpback whale, which that animal exhibits only when it is about to dive. Humpbacks feed around the islands, but not commonly ; they are the excep- tion. They do not, however, molest the seals in any manner whatever, and little squads of these pinnipeds seem to delight themselves by swimming in endless circles around and under the huge bodies of those whales, frequently leaping out and entirely over the cetacean's back, as witnessed on one occasion by myself and the crew of the Reliance off the coast of Kadiak, June, 1874.
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By these agencies, during their absence from the islands until their reappearance in the following year, and in July, they are so percep- tibly diminished in number that I do not think, fairly considered, more than one-half of the legion which left the ground of their birth last October come up the next July to these favorite landing- places-that is, only 250,000 of them return out of the 500,000 born last year. The same statement in every respect applies to the going and the coming of the 500,000 female pups, which are iden- tical in size, shape, and behavior.
As yearlings, however, these 250,000 survivors of last year's birth have become strong, lithe, and active swimmers, and when they again leave the hauling grounds, as before, in the fall, they are fully as able as are the older class to take care of themselves, and when they reappear next year, at least 225,000 of them safely return in the second season after birth. From this on I believe that they live out their natural lives of fifteen to twenty years each, the death- rate now caused by the visitation of marine enemies affecting them in the aggregate but slightly. And, again, the same will hold good touching the females, the average natural life of which, however, I take to be only nine or ten years each.
Out of these two hundred and twenty-five thousand young males we are required to save only one-fifteenth of their number to pass over to the breeding-grounds, and meet there the two hundred and twenty-five thousand young females ; in other words, the polygamous habit of this animal is such that, by its own volition, I do not think that more than one male annually out of fifteen born is needed on the breeding-grounds in the future ; but in my calculations, to be within the margin and to make sure that I save two-year-old males enough every season, I will more than double this proportion, and set aside every fifth one of the young males in question. That will leave one hundred and eighty thousand seals, in good condition, that can be safely killed every year, without the slightest injury to the perpetuation of the stock itself forever in all of its original integrity.
In the above showing I have put a very extreme estimate upon that loss sustained at sea by the pup-seals-too large, I am morally certain ; but, in attempting to draw this line safely, I wish to place the matter in the very worst light in which it can be put, and to give the seals the full benefit of every doubt. Surely I have clearly presented the case, and certainly no one will question the
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AMPHIBIAN MILLIONS.
premises after they have studied the habit and disposition of the rookeries ; hence, it is a positive and tenable statement, that no danger of the slightest appreciable degree of injury to the inter- ests of the Government on the Seal Islands of Alaska exists, as long as the present law protecting it, and the management executing it, continues.
These fur-seals of the Pribylov group, after leaving the islands in the autumn and early winter, do not visit land again until the time of their return, in the following spring and early summer, to these same rookery and hauling-grounds, unless they touch, as they are navigating their lengthened journey back, at the Russian Isl- ands, Copper and Bering, seven hundred miles to the westward of the Pribylov group. They leave our islands by independent squads, each one looking out for itself. Apparently all turn by common consent to the south, disappearing toward the horizon, and are soon lost in the vast expanse below, where they spread themselves over the entire Pacific as far south as the 48th and even the 47th parallels of north latitude : within this immense area between Japan and Oregon, doubtless, many extensive submarine fishing- shoals and banks are known to them ; at least, it is definitely understood that Bering Sea does not contain them long when they depart from the breeding rookeries and the hauling-grounds there- in. While it is carried in mind that they sleep and rest in the water with soundness and with the greatest comfort on its surface, and that even when around the land, during the summer, they frequently put off from the beaches to take a bath and a quiet snooze just beyond the surf, we can readily agree that it is no in- convenience whatever, when the reproductive functions have been discharged, and their coats renewed, for them to stay the balance of the time in their most congenial element-the briny deep.
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 au appreciable degree, diminish the seal-life, or interfere in the slightest with its regular, sure perpetuation on the breeding-
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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, can- not 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, be- cause 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 passsed 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 allow- ance, 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 .*
* I feel confident that I have placed this average of fish eaten per diem by each seal at a starvation allowance, or, in other words, it is a certain minimum
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During the winter solstice-between the lapse of the autumnal and the verging of the vernal equinoxes-in order to get this enor- mous 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
of the whole consumption. If the seals can get double the quantity which I credit them with above, startling as it seems, still I firmly believe that they eat it every year. An adequate realization by icthyologists and fishermen as to what havoc the fur-seal hosts are annually making among the cod, herring, and salmon of the northwest coast and Alaska, would disconcert and astonish them. Happily for the peace of political economists who may turn their at- tention to the settlement and growth of the Pacific coast of America, it bids fair to never be known with anything like precision. The fishing of man, both aboriginal and civilized, in the past, present, and prospective, has never been, is not, nor will it be, more than a drop in the bucket contrasted with those piscatorial labors of these icthyophagi in the waters adjacent to their birth. What catholic knowledge of fish and fishing-banks any one of those old " seecatchie " must possess, which we observe hauled out on the Pribylov rookeries each summer ! It has, undoubtedly, during the eighteen or twenty years of its life, explored every fish-eddy, bank, or shoal throughout the whole of that vast immensity of the North Pacific and Bering Sea. It has had more piscine sport in a single twelvemonth than Izaak Walton had in his whole life.
An old sea-captain, Dampier, crnising around the world just about two hundred years ago, wrote diligently thereof (or, rather, one Funnel is said to have written for him), and wrote well. He had frequent reference to meeting hair-seals and sea-lions, fur-seals, etc., and fell into repeating this maxim, evi- dently of his own making: "For wherever there be plenty of fysh, there be seals." I am sure that, unless a vast abundance of good fishing-ground was near by, no such congregation of seal-life as is that under discussion on the Seal Islands could exist. The whole eastern half of Bering Sea, in its en- tirety, is a single fish-spawning bank, nowhere deeper than fifty to seventy-five fathoms, averaging, perhaps, forty ; also, there are great reaches of fishing- shoals up and down the northwest coast, from and above the Straits of Fuca, bordering the entire southern, or Pacific coast, of the Aleutian Islands. The aggregate of cod, herring, and salmon which the seals find upon these vast icthyological areas of reproduction, must be simply enormous, and fully equal to a most extravagant demand of the voracious appetites of Callorhini.
When, however, the fish retire from spawning here, there, and everywhere over these shallows of Alaska and the northwest coast, along by the end of September to the 1st of November, every year, I believe that the young fur-
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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 dimin- ished 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 break- ers, 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 car- cass.
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 insignifi- cant cause of destruction, on account of its rarity.
The young fur-seals going out to sea for the first time, and fol- lowing 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 na- ture, 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
seal, in following them into the depths of the great Pacific, must have a really arduous struggle for existence-unless it knows of fishing-banks unknown to us. The yearlings, however, and all above that age, are endowed with suffi- cient muscular energy to dive rapidly in deep soundings, and to fish with un- doubted success. The pup, however, when it goes to sea, five or six months old, is not lithe and sinewy like the yearling ; it is podgy and fat, a compara- tively clumsy swimmer, and does not develop, I believe, into a good fisherman until it has become pretty well starved after leaving the Pribylovs.
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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 suc- cessfully, 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 in- difference 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 wan- tonly 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 be- longing to that region surprise them with spears and rifle, captur- ing quite a number every year, chiefly pups and yearlings.
When fur-seals were noticed, by myself, far away from these islands, at sea, I observed that then they were as shy and as wary as the most timorous animal would be, in dreading man's prox- imity -- sinking instantly on apprehending the approach or pres- ence of the ship, seldom to reappear to my gaze. But, when gathered in such immense numbers at the Pribylov Islands, they are suddenly metamorphosed into creatures wholly indifferent to my person. It must cause a very curious sentiment in the mind of
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him who comes for the first time, during a summer season, to the Island of St. Paul-where, when the landing boat or lighter carries him ashore from the vessel, this whole short marine journey is en- livened by the gambols and aquatic evolutions of fur-seal convoys to the " bidarrah," which sport joyously and fearlessly round and round his craft, as she is rowed lustily ahead by the natives; the fur-seals then, of all classes, " holluschickie " principally, pop their dark heads up out of the sea, rising neck and shoulders erect above the surface, to peer and ogle at him and at his boat, diving quickly to reappear just ahead or right behind, hardly beyond striking dis- tance from the oars. These gymnastics of Callorhinus are not wholly performed thus in silence, for it usually snorts and chuckles with hearty reiteration.
The sea-lion up here also manifest much the same marine in- terest, and gives the voyager an exhibition quite similar to the one which I have just spoken of, when a small boat is rowed in the neighborhood of its shore rookery ; it is not, however, so bold, con- fident, and social as the fur-seal under the circumstances, and utters only a short, stifled growl of surprise, perhaps ; its mobility, how- ever, of vocalization is sadly deficient when compared with the scope and compass of its valuable relative's polyglottis.
The hair-seals (Phoca vitulina) around these islands never ap- proached our boats in this manner, and I seldom caught more than a furtive glimpse of their short, bull-dog heads when traversing the coast by water.
The walrus (Rosmarus obesus) also, like Phoca vitulina, gave un- doubted evidence of sore alarm over the presence of my boat and crew anywhere near its proximity in similar situations, only show- ing itself once or twice, perhaps, at a safe distance, by elevating nothing but the extreme tip of its muzzle and its bleared, popping eyes above the water ; it uttered no sound except a dull, muffled grunt, or else a choking, gurgling bellow.
What can be done to promote the increase of fur seals? We cannot cause a greater number of females to be born every year than are born now ; we do not touch or disturb these females as they grow up and live ; and we never will, if the law and present management is continued. We save double-we save more than enough males to serve ; nothing more can be done by human agency ; it is beyond our power to protect them from their deadly marine enemies as they wander into the boundless ocean searching for food.
Zapadnio.
S. W, Point.
Upper Zapadnio.
Cero Hill.
NATIVES GATHERING A "DRIVE"
Aleutes selecting Holluschickie for the day's killing at English Bay, St. Paul's Island
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In view, therefore, of all these facts, I have no hesitation in say- ing, quite confidently, that under the present rules and regulations governing the sealing interests on these islands, the increase or diminution of the seal-life thereon will amount to nothing in the future ; that the seals will exist, as they do exist, in all time to come at about the same number and condition recorded by this presentation of the author.
By reference to the habit of the fur-seal, which I have discussed at length, it is now plain and beyond doubt that two-thirds of all the males which are born, and they are equal in numbers to the females born, are never permitted by the remaining third, strong- est by natural selection, to land upon the same breeding-ground with the females, which always herd thereupon en masse. Hence this great band of "bachelor " seals, or "holluschickie," so fitly termed, when it visits the island, is obliged to live apart wholly- sometimes and in some places, miles away from the rookeries ; and, by this admirable method of nature are those seals which can be killed without injury to the rookeries selected and held aside of their own volition, so that the natives can visit and take them with- out disturbing, to the least degree, that entire quiet of those breed- ing-grounds where the stock is perpetuated.
The manner in which the natives capture and drive up "hollu- schickie " from the hauling-grounds to the slaughter-fields near the two villages of St. Paul and St. George, and elsewhere on the isl- ands, cannot be improved upon. It is in this way : At the begin- ning of every sealing-season, that is, during May and June, large bodies of the young " bachelor " seals do not haul up on land very far from the water-a few rods at the most-and, when these first arrivals are sought after, the natives, to capture them, are obliged to approach slyly and run quickly between the dozing seals and the surf, before they can take alarm and bolt into the sea ; in this man- ner a dozen Aleutes, running down the sand beach of English Bay, in the early morning of some June day, will turn back from the water thousands of seals, just as the mould-board of a plough lays over and back a furrow of earth. When the sleeping seals are first startled, they arise, and, seeing men between them and the water, immediately turn, lope and scramble rapidly back up and over the land ; the natives then leisurely walk on the flanks and in the rear of this drove thus secured, directing and driving it over to the kill- ing-grounds, close by the village. The task of getting up early of
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a morning, and going out to the several hauling-grounds, closely adjacent, is really. all there is of that labor expended in securing the number of seals required for a day's work on the killing-grounds. The two, three, or four natives upon whom, in rotation, this duty is devolved by the order of their chief, rise at first glimpse of dawn, between one and two o'clock, and hasten over to Lukannon, Tol- stoi, or Zoltoi, as the case may be, " walk out " their "holluschic- kie," and have them duly on the slaughtering field before six or seven o'clock, as a rule, in the morning. In favorable weather the " drive" from Tolstoi consumes from two and a half to three hours' time ; from Lnkannon, about two hours, and is often done in an hour and a half ; while Zoltoi is so near by that the time is merely nominal.
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