The other morning I went looking for seals. Although I live in New Jersey, I drove over to Staten Island, because I know many places to look there, and it’s near my house. I brought a lunch, a notebook, and a pair of old binoculars that fit into my coat pocket. The dawning sky was clear, the temperature just above freezing. Crusted snow glittered in the headlights. Potholes, which rule the roads these days, opened before me suddenly in a wicked row on the ramp for the Outerbridge Crossing, popping my left front tire. I thought I had no spare, but when I pulled over and checked, I did. I changed the tire in a lot in Perth Amboy and got to Staten Island just after sunrise.
Hylan Boulevard, the only surface road that goes from one end of the island to the other, is a pothole festival now. I slalomed among some real beauts to the boulevard’s end, parked, and slid on the snow crust down to the beach along the Arthur Kill, where there’s a little park with a pavilion. Something so hopeful and blithe occupies an empty beach on an early morning like this, when the sun is just up and the sky is blue and the waves are pocket-size and the flag flaps on the flagpole. All the park benches had blankets of snow pulled up over their knees. A plaque by the beach noted that horseshoe crabs like to spawn here, and that the blood of horseshoe crabs contains limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL), used by science for the detection of bacterial toxins. In the extraction of the blood, the crabs are not harmed, the plaque went on to say. A flock of brants on the water croaked their creaky calls, ring-billed gulls on the breeze teetered like skateboarders, two swans groomed themselves at the water’s edge. Not a seal to be seen.
Back to the car. Another slalom run along Hylan, until I turned off at Joline Avenue. Last year, the Staten Island Advance ran a photograph of three seals sunning themselves on a Jet Ski dock just off the Joline Avenue beach. Then, two days after a storm, locals observed a young seal entangled beside a floating mooring here and called the police. A police helicopter landed on the beach and two N.Y.P.D. frogmen emerged. In full scuba gear, they waded out to the seal and disentangled it from a web of monofilament snagged on the mooring. The seal swam away, apparently fine. The frogmen high-fived. It was the first time they had rescued a seal.
Now, glassing the waters from the foot of Joline Avenue, I saw no Jet Ski dock, no mooring, no seals. More brants, more gulls. A woman was walking a German shepherd along the sand. On a higher part of the beach, a single patio chair of molded white plastic commanded a wide view. Someone might have put it there to enjoy a beer in, or for winter sunbathing. Then again, it might have been flotsam. I have seen this identical type of plastic chair in photos of the Lagos, Nigeria, city dumps in the Times. A photo of a memorial gathering for a slain Al Qaeda leader in Jordan showed a row of these same chairs in a tent. I own six of these chairs myself. I believe this type of white molded-plastic chair belongs to the growing category of the world’s ubiquitous objects.
Continuing in my car in a northeasterly direction, I stopped at Mount Loretto park, with its mile of unimproved shoreline, where seals sometimes come up on the rocks. The walk along the Mount Loretto cliffs offers a bracing seascape and many convenient observation points. People I’ve encountered here in the past have told me about seals they’ve seen, and shown me the good spots, but I found no seals this morning. However, on one of the nature signs along the path I read, “Bay scallops have 32 blue eyes that can see shadows but not images.” I paused to contemplate this. Past the old Mount Loretto lighthouse, on the beach at Lemon Creek Park, a man walking his dog told me he had seen two seals on a little piece of rock about fifty feet away, year before last. The man wore a blue ski cap and many silver earrings, and he had an ogre tattooed on each side of his neck.
A few miles farther up Hylan is Lipsett Avenue. At the end of Lipsett, in the last house before Europe, a young woman named Milissa Myers could look out the kitchen window on certain mornings and see one or more seals on a rock in the nearby cove. For a resident of New York City to be able to watch a wild seal without leaving her house is a rare thing, and Milissa appreciated it. She checked for seals every morning when she woke up, November to April (the months when seals are around). She had the sweetest and happiest voice whenever she called to tell me the seals were back, as I asked her please to do. The last time she called my cell phone with this news, I happened to be in Columbus, Ohio. Recently, Milissa moved in with her boyfriend in Queens, and her father’s girlfriend, Leah, took over the job of calling me. But I have never got to Lipsett Avenue in time to see a seal. On this morning, the seals’ preferred rock was just going under a rising tide, seal-free. To the east, open ocean; near the horizon a ship dieselled away from its trail of smoke.
Last year on the Internet I found a video of a dog barking at a seal on the Great Kills beach, but now when I went there—nothing. A huge tractor tire on its side with herring gulls standing on it, a row of white pines a recent storm had knocked down, deep snowdrifts, a man in a car in the parking lot doing a crossword puzzle. Waves rolled onto the shore with a rhythm like breathing. And at the northeastern tip of the island, under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, where I knew for sure that seals had been recently seen—similarly nothing. That part of Staten Island is a New World symphony, though, with the bridge humming above, and the tall towers holding up their roadway span like a great gate, and tanker ships anchored at different angles in the Harbor, and the tidal currents colliding.
Just north of the bridge, in the parking lot of Von Briesen Park, I met Paul Sieswerda, the top expert on the city’s seals. Anybody looking for seals in New York City stands a good chance of running across him. Paul Sieswerda is retired from the New York Aquarium, where he worked for twenty-one years, many of them as curator. He worked at the New England Aquarium before that. He is in his late sixties and has a strong Boston accent, moist, dark eyes, and a mouth that turns down at the corners. A conscientious observer would mention that he does look sort of like a seal. Sieswerda was born and grew up in Malden, near Boston. Watching Jacques Cousteau movies as a boy made him fascinated with the sea. His connections to seals go back to the early seventies, when he was just starting out on the staff at the New England Aquarium and brought an abandoned harbor-seal pup home to care for—an act that would not be possible today. Today, most aquariums do not accept sick or stranded animals, because of the trouble of caring for them and the risk of infection inside their tanks. Also, federal law now keeps humans away from wild seals.
Having the pup at their house changed the Sieswerdas permanently. Mrs. Sieswerda fed it a mixture of cottage cheese and cream supplied gratis by a local dairy. The seal ate five baby bottles full, five feedings a day. Paul Sieswerda did the disagreeable work of cleanup. (Seals are known for their carelessness about hygiene.) The pup spent much of its time in a kiddie pool in the Sieswerdas’ back yard, where their two young children played with it. It had a starring role at one of their birthday parties. The children named it Cecil, and the family made up a rhyme that went, “Cecil, the seal, who came from the sea, / Lives at the Sieswerdas’, just like me.”
When fully recuperated, the seal was returned to the New England Aquarium, where it became part of the collection. In time, Cecil turned out to be Cecile, and had offspring with a male harbor seal named Hoover, one of the aquarium’s celebrities. Hoover had spent his youth in the aquarium’s outdoor exhibition pool, available to people walking by on the Boston waterfront twenty-four hours a day. Some seals pick up language the way parrots do, and can develop a vocabulary. When Hoover reached adolescence, the age at which many animals begin to vocalize, he suddenly began to speak phrases that passersby apparently had repeated to him. In the local accent, he came out with “Hey, Hoovah, g’wan, get outta heah.” Similar remarks followed, with the result that scientists began to study him. (The aquarium still has a recording of Hoover’s speech on its Web site.) Hoover died in the eighties and Cecile in ’92, but some of their descendants at the aquarium have received scientific attention as well; a male named Chacoda (Chuck), who can say a number of words, is under study today. Through Cecile, the Sieswerdas may be said to be part of a distinguished New England seal family.
Another famous seal at the New England Aquarium during Sieswerda’s tenure was Andre, the long-distance traveller from Rockport, Maine. This seal, who had been rescued from a fishing net, spent winters at the aquarium and every spring swam a hundred and eighty miles from Marblehead, Massachusetts, back to Rockport. A movie was made about him, starring Keith Carradine as the man who rescued him. Andre was also a harbor seal. The harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) is one of the world’s most common seals. Its range is the East and West Coasts of North America—Baja California to Alaska, and the Carolinas to Iceland—and along the western coast of Europe as far south as Portugal and the east coast of Asia as far south as Japan. In the grouping Pinnipedia, which also includes walruses, harbor seals belong to the family Phocidae, the “earless” seals, also called the “true” seals. Their heads are smooth, like an earless dog’s.
Because a harbor seal’s hind flippers are parallel to its body, it can only wriggle, wormlike, on ice or land. Many people, when they think of seals, think of the ones that can maneuver upright and clap their front flippers and honk bicycle horns. Those are actually sea lions. The hind flippers of sea lions can bend forward, giving them more mobility when out of the water. Sea lions are of the family Otariidae, the “eared” seals. Their heads have small earflaps. Following show-business tradition, the animal who played Andre in the movie about him was a sea lion. In fact, there are no sea lions in the Atlantic Ocean. Like many entertainers, they inhabit the other coast.
I left my car in the lot at Von Briesen Park and got in Paul Sieswerda’s, and we went over the Verrazano, took the Belt Parkway through Brooklyn, and turned south on Flatbush Avenue. Out here the city is mostly sky, water, and reedy expanses crossed by airplane shadows. On the other side of the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge, on that far-flung Queens peninsula called the Rockaways, we parked by the dock of a ninety-five-foot three-engine boat, the American Princess. In half an hour it would be leaving on a seal-watching cruise in the Harbor, as it does every week during seal season, weather permitting. Sieswerda often goes along as its naturalist and expert on seals.
Twenty years ago, you almost never saw a seal in New York City waters. Now the number of seals here has increased to the point that a boat can charge passengers twenty-four dollars apiece (children and large groups less) for a three-hour seal-watching cruise, and be reasonably sure of success. The week before, the cruise had counted more than forty seals. What brought about the change was this:
Seals used to be regarded the way rats or coyotes are—every man’s hand was against them. Those not killed for their meat or hides or oil got a bullet on general principles, because they competed with humans for fish. This applied especially to harbor seals, who tended to be the closest seals around. A harbor-seal skeleton on display at the aquarium has a bullet in one of its vertebrae. Naturally, seal numbers began to decline. Some species were believed to be endangered, others threatened. In the mid-sixties, the direness of the situation jolted the public with books and movies about the killing of baby harp seals off the Atlantic coast of Canada. The harp-seal hunt had always taken place where few could see. Now movies showed baby harp seals screaming as they were clubbed, and skinned seals writhing in agony.
Such images entered the collective memory. It’s hard to overstate their effect. Seals have large eyes that are adapted to adjust quickly between dim underwater light and bright light on the surface, and their irises, like all pinnipeds’, are dark. For people to react emotionally to an animal, it can’t have little, piggy eyes, and seals don’t. They are what environmentalists call “charismatic megafauna”; staring with big brown eyes into a camera lens proved to be a survival advantage for them. In 1972, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act, whose prohibitions included the killing or harassment of any wild seal. After this law, you couldn’t even go within a hundred yards of one, and anyplace seals colonized became off limits to humans—a provision that has led to the takeover of docks and piers in San Francisco by sea lions, and of a popular children’s beach in San Diego by sea lions and harbor seals.
Add to this the movie “Jaws” (I’m speculating here), which inspired more anglers to fish for sharks, thus reducing the population of a major seal predator; the cleanup of American coastal waters following additional environmental legislation in the seventies; the growing numbers of herring, a favorite seal food; and maybe the effects of global warming on water temperatures. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, people began to notice an increase in seals in Long Island Sound, where they had not been plentiful since the nineteen-thirties. In 1984, a biologist, observing the proliferation of seals on the coast of Massachusetts, predicted that they would continue to expand their range southward. Between 1975 and 1988, a marine-mammal stranding center on the Jersey Shore was seeing stranded seals in single-digit numbers every year. Soon there were many dozens.
An estimated four hundred seals wintered on Long Island in 1986. By ’92 there were reports of seal pups being born on the North Shore. Along with harbor seals, several species of a more Arctic range—harp, ringed, hooded, and gray seals—began to turn up. The Sound’s seal population grew to more than a thousand. In 1993, Kevin Walsh, of the New York Aquarium, said there was a harbor seal living under the Williamsburg Bridge. In ’97, Sieswerda reported that occasional seals could be spotted on out-of-the-way beaches in Brooklyn and Queens. In 2001, kayakers said that they saw about a dozen harbor seals living on Swinburne Island, in the Lower Harbor, two and a half miles from the Verrazano Bridge. This was the first report of a seal colony in city waters. Every year since then has brought an increase in the city’s seals. In ’04 a hooded seal “hauled out” and basked on the fuel dock at the World’s Fair Marina, in Flushing Bay, by the Grand Central Parkway. In ’06, Donald E. Moore III, the director of the Prospect Park Zoo, saw twenty-six seals off Orchard Beach, in the Bronx. A harbor seal slept for a day on the kayak dock at the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin in ’08 and again in ’09. A seal suffering a possible shark wound came ashore at Breezy Point, in the Rockaways, on January 18, 2010. And so on.
Meanwhile, in northern waters where the population expansion may have begun, a new abundance of seals attracted great white sharks. Last summer and the summer before, shark-chewed seals washed up on the shores of Cape Cod. The town of Chatham, Massachusetts, banned swimming within three hundred feet of seals. Spotters in an airplane reported a fifteen-foot great white shark chasing seals south of Nauset Beach, on the Cape, last July. Public beaches in the vicinity were later closed. Researchers put transmitters on some of the sharks, who left for waters off Florida in the fall.
Sieswerda believes in “citizen science,” he told the passengers, who were several families with children; a grant writer named Shari and her husband, Mitch, both bird-watchers; a well-dressed woman from Ukraine with her daughter; two dreadlocked guys and a young woman in patchy trousers; a hand-holding young couple; and a genial older guy in a corduroy baseball cap. Sieswerda was speaking into a feedback-prone microphone in the cabin while some parents figured out what the children would order at the snack bar. He explained that when the boat came upon seals today he wanted each passenger to make an individual count and then tell it to him, and also to take as many photographs as possible. If the passengers were willing, they could later e-mail him the photos. Sieswerda collects seal information from boat captains, bird-watchers, fishermen, many kayakers, and people on seal cruises. Then he compiles it. Each year in March or early April he goes out with a group and does his own eyewitness census: the group counted nine seals in the Harbor in ’06, twelve in ’07, sixteen in ’08, twenty in ’09, and thirty-three last year.
The high-rise apartment buildings of Brighton Beach and the tall red T of the Parachute Jump ride at Coney Island passed in the starboard windows as Sieswerda ran through some of his seal photographs on the cabin’s flat-screen TV. The one everybody wanted a closer look at showed a harbor seal with a shark bite. A friend of Sieswerda’s took the picture last April at Swinburne Island. The seal is out of the water, reclining on its side on a rock, a large wound on its lower body turned to the sun as if for the healing rays. It appears to be in otherwise good health. Going in closer on the wound, Sieswerda pointed out that it had ragged tooth marks on its edges and conformed in shape and size to the jaw structure of a shark. He hoped that when the wound became a scar he could use it to identify this particular seal. Right now he has no way to tell one seal from another. He doesn’t know if individual seals are returning every fall, or where they come from, or where they go in the spring.
After the lecture, people stepped out on deck, where it was bright and windy but not too cold. The boat’s progress took it across the Ambrose Channel, the main shipping route into and out of the city. The captain sped up to avoid a huge inbound cargo ship, which went by in our wake with its containers piled high like a waiter balancing dishes. Its name was the CMA CGM Florida. Swinburne Island approached, and Sieswerda suggested that the captain make a wide circuit around it and then come up to its west side slowly, by imperceptible advances, the way he had seen Eskimos sneak up on seals in the Bering Sea. The captain liked the idea but said there wasn’t time.
When islands are grim they can be grim indeed, and Swinburne is that. Nobody lives on it and visitors are forbidden by the National Park Service, which has authority, because the island is part of the Gateway National Recreation Area. Swinburne was dredged out of the water to house quarantined immigrants back in the late nineteenth century, as was its larger companion, Hoffman Island, three-quarters of a mile away. Staten Islanders who hated having a quarantine hospital in their neighborhood had rioted and burned the hospital down, so these islands were created as isolated places for quarantine where no citizens would object. Hoffman held immigrants who had only been exposed to disease, while Swinburne was for the more seriously ill. A tall brick smokestack, said to have been the chimney of its crematorium, still stands as Swinburne’s main landmark. Dark, buzzardlike cormorants roost in its stunted trees. The city is near enough so that you can see how traffic is moving on the Verrazano.
I have fished the shorelines of both Hoffman and Swinburne Islands with a guide out of Great Kills Harbor, casting up next to the rocks. At mean low water the depth off Swinburne is just seven feet, but a few hundred yards to the south the bottom drops suddenly to twenty-four feet. Big fish wait in holes like that for bait tumbled by the tide; maybe the seals like to hunt there, too. In any case, the west side of Swinburne Island is their favorite place in the city. On that side the rocks are low enough for them to haul out on, and a few stumps of pilings can support them in an odd basking posture, curved like cocktail wieners on toothpicks. Last April, when I accompanied Sieswerda on his seal census, fifteen seals or more slid off the rocks and pilings as our boat eased around the western corner.
This time, our rather more abrupt appearance disclosed no basking seals. At the waterline the rocks were a dark greenish-black. Just above that, fresh seaweed made a band of bright green; above that was a stripe of plain gray rock with white splashes of droppings. Close scans of the rocks picked out only gulls standing on them or bobbing in the water alongside. Then among the pilings one seal head popped up, then another. The heads had their own smooth shiningness, like wet rubber. Seals can’t resist observing anybody observing them. Soon several more had come up to one side of the boat or the other. People were going to different places on the rail, pointing, lifting up children so they could see. A little girl in a hooded coat was fussing. “You have tissues in your pocket and you should use them,” her father told her.
Sieswerda circulated from person to person, asking how many each had counted. The maximum number anybody seemed to have accumulated was ten, and eventually he decided that no more than ten were in attendance today. “The rest must be having lunch,” he said. “They found a school of herring somewhere.” The smell of the boat’s new coat of white paint hung in the air, a helicopter thudded overhead, a gray Coast Guard boat went by. Seal-watchers standing in the bow all held their binoculars to their eyes with their right hands, and from the back they seemed to be saluting. Even such a small number of seals kept things lively, popping up in new places like a Whac-A-Mole. Sometimes when they ducked under they went head first and sometimes they leaned back with a sort of luxurious rearward yielding. A crew member kept announcing new seal locations loudly over the public address.
After a while, the boat moved on toward Hoffman Island, which has seals only on occasion, probably because its shoreline rocks are higher up off the water. During this interlude many people adjourned inside and bought hot eggplant sandwiches at the snack bar. Shari, the bird-watcher, stayed on deck with her binoculars and camera. She said that she and her husband had so far seen three kinds of gulls—herring, ring-billed, and greater black-backed—along with brants, scoters, double-crested cormorants, long-tail ducks, and a loon. She said that in the past they had spotted other loons in New York City waters, and I asked if they’d ever heard a loon’s cry here. They hadn’t, and didn’t know anyone who had. Do the loons make that glorious wild cry only in more remote settings, like the North Woods of Maine? Wouldn’t it be something to hear it when you are, say, riding the Staten Island Ferry? Definitely the loons stop over here, but apparently they keep silent when they do—an ornithological peculiarity.
Past Hoffman the boat continued into the Narrows until the bridge impended above. The captain cut the engines and let the tide pull us toward it, coasting a hundred yards offshore. With the engines quiet you could hear the trucks and cars. We came up almost to the place where I had looked for seals on the rocks a couple of hours earlier. The crewman on the loudspeaker called out that there were seals to the left. Someone said that a seal had just slid off a rock, and I saw it a few seconds later. With typical seal curiosity it gave us a good perusal—passing the length of the boat and checking it out while doing a sidestroke—before it disappeared.
For security reasons, boats aren’t allowed to sit under bridges. Soon we turned around and headed back to have another look at Swinburne Island. Sieswerda thought we might find more seals this time, but when we got closer there were fewer. The seal heads appeared farther from the boat and over a wider expanse of water. Sieswerda made some final totting up on his clipboard. He said all the seals seen today had been harbor seals, as near as he could tell. The winter sun was lower in the sky and lit the island differently, pouring through the row of narrow empty windows of a one-story brick ruin. On a corner atop the chimney stack a peregrine falcon had taken up a perch. The elegant little predator came into focus against the sky framed by the binoculars’ circle, moving his head back and forth surveillantly.
As usual when there are no clouds over the city, the high, white streaks of jet trails stretched like chalk smears across a blackboard. They combined with the landscape lines funnelling toward the bridge, the queue of ships getting smaller and smaller as they receded to the horizon, the boat and helicopter traffic, the wheeling gulls. Everything in the world seemed to be inrushing or outgoing. I thought of the immigrants from all over who had ended up on these Quarantine Islands, as they once were called; I imagined the young Vito Corleone, fresh from escaping his mother’s murderers in Sicily, looking out the window of his room on Swinburne Island with the chalk mark that designated him as unhealthy still on his coat; and thought how he might even have seen this same sea view, had he been real.
That seals have recolonized New York Harbor, where they hadn’t lived for at least a century, is a remarkable development made ordinary by the gradual way it occurred. Large carnivorous wild mammals now take up residence in the city’s waters annually from November to April, and we know almost nothing about their greater life. Sieswerda would like to put a camera on Swinburne to observe its seals all day for whatever else he can learn, combining research with a live feed set up as an exhibit at the aquarium. But the red tape involved in doing that would be too much for him at his age, he says.
The only solid piece of evidence about where Swinburne’s seals come from is a satellite tracking record provided by a transmitter on the back of a seal released in 2008 by the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, on Long Island. This seal, a gray, had been rescued in a malnourished condition from a Montauk beach. A transmitter about the size of a cell phone was epoxied to his back when he was released, after some months of rehabilitation. (The transmitters, which cost about forty-five hundred dollars each, send signals to a satellite when the animal is on the surface. The transmitter falls off when the animal molts.) The gray seal was put back in the ocean at Hampton Bays, and at first he headed east toward Montauk. After a few days he turned around and came down Long Island’s ocean shore. Near the end of the island he suddenly veered left and swam out to the edge of the Continental Shelf, about a hundred and ten miles from land. After a while he came back in, and his transmitter began to send location readings consistent (accurate to a hundred yards) with those of Swinburne Island. Soon afterward, transmissions stopped.
Transmission records of other rehabbed seals released by Riverhead staffers show a wide dispersal. Seals sometimes go from Long Island up to Maine, Canada, Greenland. A ringed seal who came ashore at Smithtown, Long Island, suffering from pneumonia was rescued, cured, and fed until ready for release. He went back to the sea at the Hampton Bays site in June, 2006. His transmissions plotted a route along the East Coast and into Davis Strait, above Newfoundland. He then headed northwest along the shore of Baffin Island. When transmissions stopped, in November, he was even farther north, near an Arctic fastness called Devon Island, more than three thousand miles from his starting point. Given this kind of data, it seems safe to say that at least some of the seals who spend time in New York City are widely travelled animals.
One of James Thurber’s most famous cartoons is of a man and woman lying in a bed, and the woman is saying to the man, “All right, have it your way—you heard a seal bark!” Meanwhile, behind the bed’s headboard, and partly hidden by it, a large seal looks off to the left. The animal is upright, and thus must be a sea lion, not a seal, though mentioning this discrepancy to Thurber probably would have irked him. The drawing came about by chance. Originally, he was trying to draw a seal on a rock looking at two small figures in the distance and saying to itself, “Hm, explorers.” When the rock Thurber produced looked more like a headboard, he adjusted and kept going.
The famous cartoon is a moment of mad clarity, but the one behind it is just as profound. Seals are really like the one on the rock-headboard—curious, observant, sly, if not always exactly thoughtful. They share a common ancestor with canines and are among the animals that have evolved from land back into the sea. Their sensitivity to humans resembles that of dogs, and gives them good coexistence skills. Helped by the protection of law, they are shaping up to be the type of adaptive animal—like starlings, buzzards, crows, raccoons, wild hogs, coyotes, wild turkeys, Canada geese, deer, Asian carp—that can fit in with the man-made world. In the future, they may become as common in the Harbor as deer are in the suburbs. Seals have a self-promotional skill unknown to other wild animals and essential to the successful salesman: they find us interesting. Sole possessors of an excellent piece of real estate off limits to humans but in the middle of it all, seals will probably be returning to the city every November from now on. ♦
