Typically the newborn Elephant Seals don’t move their heads around much after birth, but this new pup seems to have something to prove.

Jocelyn decided to give birth this morning, after spending 5 days sussing out the island. This is the same time spent on land as the other mom this breeding season, and the same timeline this seal had last year. These seals having remarkably consistent timing!

The new pup seems incredibly well developed and mobile, and immediately after getting born started squawk-chirping this our resident wean-ling Mikey. While some Elephant Seal mom’s can be very protective of their young, Jocelyn seems very chill about having another pup hanging out around her.

Our current Elephant Seal family, not shown here the grumpy Beachmaster who only wants to mate. Shows the difference between a newborn pup and a 28 day old weanling.

Mikey is all on his own, exploring the island mouth-first and trying to avoid running into the angry Beachmaster.

Ecological Notes:

Beverly wrapped up her time nursing her pup, mated a couple of times, and headed back to the open ocean to recover her lost weight. She spent 27 days on land, nursing her pup for 21 days, the exact same number of days as last year. She has remarkably consistent timing.

Beverly and Micheal Day 1. Starting around 500kg she’ll end up losing around 200kg throughout nursing.

Beverly and Micheal Day 21. Beverly has lost around 40% of her weight throughout nursing.

The next working we woke up to the bellowing of a new pregnant elephant seal, timing and characteristics point to this seal being Jocelyn (another return from last year), but she is not tagged, so we’re guessing that it’s her by comparing photos of identifying scars. This is a day later than she showed up last year, and we’re excited at the prospect of another elephant seal pup! After 5 pups last year the thought of only having one pup born here was pretty disappointing.

The seal we suspect is Jocelyn, she is soooo big I’m surprised she could make it up the ramp.

For those interested, the Beachmaster mated with Beverly 27 times 4 days (that were noticed/documented). It’s an impressive feat for sure, but seems to depend on the exhaustion that sets in towards the end of nursing. On bigger beaches a Bachmaster can have a harmem of 30-100 females, so only having 1 or 2 females to mate with could be related to our males ‘vigour’.

Elephant Seal mating can be pretty unpleasant to watch sometimes, but it’s clearly a method that works for them or the population wouldn’t have recovered from near-extinction.

Facility Work:

After last weeks 50 knot blasting, we spent this week repairing the electric fence and picking up the pieces that blew off the buildings. We’ve had some massive high tides, as well as some logs piling up on the jetty. I’m still unsure what the actualy conditions are that contribute to the log pileup, but we made sure to snag some good looking firewood logs for next winters Eco-Guardians.

Beverly navigating the log-jam on the boat ramp.

DND events:

2 days with blasting since the last update, but it’s been very quiet. We did see Coast Guard heading offshore during the big blows, practice makes perfect!

Feature Event:

Weather – Current:

http://www.victoriaweather.ca/current.php?id=72

Flat calm weather and winds under 3 knots have been delightful the last couple of nights. We’re still trying to figure out how you can get a crystal clear sky, and enough fog to set off the fog horn…

Weather – Past:

http://www.victoriaweather.ca/station.php?

Last weeks wind scouring led to this weeks flat calm, perfect time to pick up the pieces and get ready for whenever the next storm rolls through.

Weaning for Elephant Seals consists of abandoning their pups on the beach. Mikey didn’t enjoy that much, and screamed for the whole first night before accepting his independence.