Pups Escape a Cruel Sea : Sick and Starving, Four Young Sea Lions Find Help Ashore

The baby sea lion, so weak with pneumonia that it could barely let out a groan, lay helpless on the shelf of a boulder in Newport Beach. Instead of clear and alert, its dark eyes were as glassy as the ocean.

“Hey there, little guy,” Judi Jones cooed softly to the 7-month-old creature, so emaciated its ribs were showing. “How did you get up there? You want to come down or what?”

Then with a quick swing of her large net, she and her fellow rescuers snared the sick animal and gently lifted it down from its rocky perch. Then it was placed in a large cage.

The 34-pound sea lion pup was one of four discovered Wednesday afternoon at “the Wedge”--the tip of Balboa Peninsula.

“This is a record,” said Jones, director for Friends of the Sea Lion Marine Mammal Center, a Laguna Beach marine organization that is involved in rescues of sea mammals along the Orange County coast. “I’ve never seen four (sick animals beached) at once like this before.”

The marine center was alerted to the plight of the sea animals by beach-goers and the Newport Beach Police Department, which runs the city’s animal control agency. An hour later, they were at the beach, cages and nets in hand, to bring the animals into protective captivity and nurse them back to health.

Huntington Beach fisherman Ron Oxley, 31, said he was on the jetty when he spotted the first of the pups, barely breathing and so weak it could not protect itself. It had nonetheless managed to climb onto the rock ledge out of the surf.

“The birds were picking at its skin,” Oxley said. “It was so sad. I tried to give it an anchovy, but he wouldn’t take it. That’s surprising.”

He then flagged down a police officer who was near the beach and made his way back to the sea lions to make sure that they were not bothered by other curious beach-goers.

“This is the first time I saw anything like this,” he said.

Three of the pups had managed to pull themselves onto the rocks of the Newport Beach Harbor jetty.

“They’re amazing climbers,” Jones said. “They’re very agile, even when they are sick.”

The fourth washed ashore onto the sand and collapsed there. It was unable to fend off the swarms of gulls, who picked at its body with their beaks before Jones and the others arrived.

Costa Mesa fisherman Lin Vo, 49, said he first noticed the pups in the waters off the jetty several weeks ago. They appeared healthy, then disappeared until Wednesday.

“They used to be so aggressive when I fed them fish,” Vo said. “Now he’s not even moving.”

Jones theorized that the sea lions, which grow to as large as 1,000 pounds at maturity, were literally being starved to death in the open ocean during the March storms. During the rainy period, schools of fish that the pups normally feed on were forced deep into the ocean, beyond their reach.

Jones said that since March, when the rains pounded the Southland, the group has rescued 65 sea mammals, many of them undernourished, from San Pedro in Los Angeles County to San Onofre in San Diego County.

In addition, the sea pups’ immune systems were being weakened by increasing pollution in the local feeding grounds off Newport Beach.

“It’s just a real natural thing that when their resistance gets down, the respiratory system gets affected,” said Jones, who is also a nurse. “The pollution is having its effect on them as well as us.”

Instinct drove the pups to seek a place where they can dry out and recover, Jones said.

“There are few places anymore around here where they can go and rest,” Jones said. “It is sort of a coincidental thing that they ended up at the same place at the same time.”

After their capture, the sea lions were taken to the marine center in Laguna Beach, where they were given antibiotics and force-fed water and glucose to speed their recovery.

Jones said that all the sea lions should survive. Only one was seriously ill. After they recover, which should take several months, they will be taken to Crescent Bay in Laguna Beach and released.

“These poor guys,” Jones said. “They were definitely having a bad time.”