Sea Lion Finds Itself Up a Creek Near UCI but Eludes Rescuers

Sunday did not offer the usual business fare--stray dogs and cats and dead birds--for Debi Fulbright.

At 7:30 a.m. sharp, the darndest thing happened to the Irvine animal services officer.

“It was really weird for me. I mean we don’t have an ocean in Irvine and yet my first call out this morning at the shelter was to rescue a sea lion,” Fulbright said.

By noon, they were calling it The Great Seal Caper at police headquarters and at the same time hoping the story of the wayward critter had a happy ending.

Two hours after the 150-pound sea lion was discovered in the San Diego Creek Channel--less than a mile from the UC Irvine campus--it bobbed away. Fulbright and a director of the Laguna Beach Friends of the Sea Lion said the animal was last seen in midafternoon in deep water of Upper Newport Bay.

Jogger Sees Sea Lion

A jogger on a trail along the channel spotted the sea lion before 7:30 a.m., Fulbright said, on the bank of a ravine at University and Campus drives. The animal looked like a boat on land, Fulbright said, about two miles from the Upper Bay in a channel with only two or three feet of water.

Fulbright was summoned to the channel bank and, having “no expertise in these things,” she contacted Karin Wayman, curator of the Friends of the Seal Lion, a center for marine mammal care.

“I’d say it was at least a 150-pound sea lion,” Fulbright said, “just out there sunning itself.”

For two hours the women, along with Irvine police officers Ed Uffelman and Robert Andersen, waded through the channel in knee-high boots and tried unsuccessfully to herd the animal into a big fishing net.

Wayman got near enough to hear the sea lion wheezing and she detected a runny snout, Fulbright said. The diagnosis: upper respiratory infection.

‘It Swam Off’

“But it swam off and headed (south) toward the Newport Back Bay,” Fulbright said.

Because the sea lion moved to fairly deep water, “we just can’t do much,” Judi Jones, a Friends of the Sea Lion director, said Sunday. “They just swim too good; they’re too agile, too fast, for us to get them out the water. We just have to wait until they beach. . . . Any sea lion or seal that is sick or injured, they usually will beach. And that’s when we pick them up and bring them back here.”

Jones said Wayman had reported that the sea lion, an adult of unknown sex, was emaciated and “definitely is sick. . . . It looks like the one we got a few weeks ago that had cancer.”

Rarely are seals or sea lions found stranded or trapped in a river channel, Jones said. In fact, the one found weeks ago was a first in the area.

“We went into the Santa Ana River channel . . . where the water was two or three feet deep” to get the sea lion, Jones said.

They barely got the creature out, she said. The tide came in, the channel floor was “mucky” and “you sink if you don’t keep moving.”

They were able to capture got the sick animal with the help of a man living near the channel who rowed his boat to the rescue, and several residents who waded in to help. The rescued creature, however, was gravely ill with cancer and died within a few days.

“We felt that it was worthwhile because she was inside and warm and no one was throwing sticks at her,” Jones said.

On Sunday, the would-be rescuers were hoping the ailing sea lion had made its voyage back to sea.

Fulbright was called away before the scene cleared.

“I had to leave because there was a steer loose on Laguna Canyon (Road),” said Fulbright, a 9-year veteran animal services officer.

“The call after that was a deer caught in bob wire off at the undeveloped side of (William R.) Mason (Regional) Park, then a run-over rattlesnake that had made its way over into the bushes over in Turtlerock. A gopher snake is all it turned out to be. But we had about 20 neighbors out there with shovels, though,” Fulbright said.

“I had an injured bird call after that. Usually Sundays are slow,” Fulbright said. “Today was just insane.”