My trip this weekend was to the Morro Bay area to join a group down at the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery. It’s peak time of year, as the females have been giving birth since mid-December.
The reason we got together saturday was that an early morning high tide was going to shrink the size of the beach, compressing the seals together. They were grumpy to start, the hope was that they would be grumpy AND cramped. There was some fighting going on, but the main alphas had their territories and mates worked out and didn’t argue much; it was the lesser males sparring and working on the pecking order, and it was the lesser males running like crazy away from the alphas and the females trying not to be caught.
So needless, there was a lot of action, but no heavyweight fights.
The morning broke to fog, which came and went throughout, and which gave the place a weird moody feel. I set myself up as a position I’d staked out earlier that gave me good angles up the beach. Others in the group set up in other locations or wandered the area. Images from the outing are being posted to this flickr group.
The females wean their pups for about a month, giving off a large percentage of their body weight to the pup, and then the pups wean, and the females go into heat. The males mate them, and then the females leave again.
There are sometimes significant disagreements about who gets to make with whom, and for the females, it’s whether the males can catch them. It’s not exactly consensual. The female’s tactic is to run, and if caught, throw sand in his face and hope he gets distracted.
Elephant seals can move surprisingly fast for something that big and bulky – for about ten feet, at which point they need to stop and rest.
The rule on the sand is pretty clearly “if it’s bigger than you are, run…” — the smaller seal invariably loses the argument, sometimes badly. Newborns are sometimes attacked by the adult males, but more often the males simply run over them if they don’t get out of the way. I saw a couple of cases of that Saturday — no significant injuries, but it had to hurt.
There are three primary sounds on the elephant seal beach: the adults make two primary sounds, one that sounds like a burp, and one that sounds like a fart. Now, imagine thousands of elephant seals all cramped together on a beach… the infants make a sound that more or less sounds like a malfunctioning car alarm.
The pups will stick around for some time after that learning to swim and building body strength, but the adult’s responsibility for them is now ended. Many don’t survive the first year. The males will molt and then head off into the waters again, so by March the beach will be mostly empty until the cycle starts again next fall.
After a few hours, we all headed off for some breakfast and chat, then I headed back to Morro Bay for an afternoon of serious birding.
All of my elephant seal images are now on my flickr account, or you can look at this slideshow:
Many thanks to Mike Baird and the Photomorrobay group for organizing this and letting me tag along…
This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery. This article is copyright 2013 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.