Daily Archives: Friday,November 20, 2015

Visitors and Helicopters

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Ecological Happenings

A nice day at RR today – moderate winds and clear sky. Nothing else to report.

Vessels

  • One pleasure vessel.
  • Two tour boats. One of these boats was travelling through the reserve quite fast. A few weeks ago, an email was sent to remind companies of the guidelines. Most have taken note and responded, yet there are some we see whizzing through.
  • Two Coast Guard helicopters were in and around the reserve, taking aerial photographs.

Other

  • 11 visitors on the island today, who used the student house for a meeting from 9:30am -12:00pm.

Elephant seal behaviour

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I received this email from the ecoguardian about interesting elephant seal beahviour:

A few weeks ago we saw a E-seal pup from Ano Nuevo (see the pictures attached). When it encountered some difficulty in getting off our docks, one of the larger E-seals was behaving very motherly. It was quite panicked and monitoring the pup closely swimming from one side of the dock to the other, reaching up to see it. In the photo I’ve attached you can see her peering up to see the pup, which she was doing over and over again. I have since seen these two around together in the water as well.

The research says that mothers are only with pups for 4 weeks – so I’m intrigued by this behaviour as this pup must be about 9 months old or so…maybe some mothers stay around for longer? Or there is other behaviour that I’m not aware of……