Tale of the Pups : Thousands of Sea Lions Give Birth on Island, Then Mating Cycle Continues

A two-month fest of birthing, fighting, fasting and mating began last week as one of nature’s great maternity wards started to fill 60 miles off the Ventura coast.

Four thousand California sea lions already have trundled onto the fine white-sand beaches of wind-swept San Miguel Island to have their pups. By the end of June, perhaps 20,000 will have given birth.

And if June is the month of birth, July is the month of procreation on this isolated western tip of the Channel Islands National Park.

Mature males, fat from weeks of deep-water foraging, are arriving now to scout out the terrain.

By the time that they leave in early August, the 1,000-pound males will have lost half their body weight either from mating, fighting for that privilege or pining over their losses.

Just 10% of males actually mate.

“It’s absolutely spectacular what has happened out here,” said Robert DeLong, a federal marine biologist who arrived on the island last week.

DeLong has returned to San Miguel repeatedly since 1967 to chart the populations of sea lions and four other species of seal that live on the island or migrate there each year.

All are increasing in number. Since the 1930s, when 1,000 sea lions were born on San Miguel each year, the number of births increased steadily to 16,000 last summer as the U.S. government has extended its protection of them.

The seals and sea lions come to San Miguel in great numbers because it is safe--isolated from humans and meat-eating predators on shore.

“The thing to remember about this island is that it is unique,” DeLong, 50, said.

Only in the Arctic regions--and perhaps a stretch of the South African coast--do so many seals and sea lions gather in one place at one time. More than 40,000 will clog a two-mile stretch of San Miguel beach next month, DeLong said.

And nowhere else in the world do so many species of seals and sea lions mate and have their babies together, he said.

About a third of the world’s California sea lions are born on San Miguel during the summer. About half of the world’s northern elephant seals are born on the same beaches during the winter.

Thousands of harbor seals and northern fur seals are also born there each year. The rare Guadalupe fur seal from an island off Baja California also drops by for visits.

On a gray afternoon last week, a strip of beach at Adams Cove on San Miguel’s western tip had the anxious feel of the calm before a storm.

“The births are just getting started now,” said Sharon Melin, a National Marine Fisheries Service researcher who works with DeLong, as she hid behind a sand dune near thousands of seals and seal lions.

The creatures’ habitat has the smell of an animal shelter and their odor is clear and pungent from a mile away. Up close, their barks and whines and roars drown out other sounds.

Only a few feet from Melin, two 12-foot-long elephant seals hoisted themselves onto their back flippers and thundered deep gurgles at each other before playfully gnawing at each other’s necks.

Thousands of elephant seals mate on the island in the winter. Hundreds of juveniles have returned now to shed their skin and fur. And the males sometimes practice the threats that they will use in earnest when battling for mating primacy as adults.

Nearby, pregnant sea lions had lost their usual sociability and barked warnings in all directions. New mothers lolled in the warm sand or preened by raising their noses and slowly turning their heads from side to side.

The tiny pups nuzzled and nursed their mothers or slipped a few feet away before squealing back with a high-pitched whine for help.

When one female sea lion delivered a pup, screeching sea gulls swooped in for the afterbirth.

“It gets so much louder as the breeding season comes,” Melin said. “People say, ‘How can you stand this barking?’ But you just don’t hear it except in the morning. Then it’s the barking and the birds, which is better than waking up to sirens and loud radios.”

Melin, 27, has been coming to the island since 1988. She spent last summer there. She will be there from April through August this year.

For several weeks, until a national park ranger occupied a station on the other end of San Miguel, she was the only human inhabitant of the barren eight-mile-long island.

Melin lives on a high bluff in a rectangular metal box whose small windows overlook pristine coves and dunes covered with brightly flowering ice plant.

Her shed is equipped with a computer, radio and stove--all solar-powered. She bathes in a natural spring not far away and drinks bottled water from the mainland. She has a radio, but no TV.

Her days are full, Melin said. She wakes at dawn, then hunkers down for hours in camouflaged observation blinds to identify sea lions and to track their every movement.

Her studies will help determine for the first time what sea lions do for the 16 to 20 years they live. She is following up on a branding program that began five years ago.

So far, 1,600 sea lions can be identified by a number on their left shoulders. Each fall, another 500 pups are branded and their numbers entered into a computerized log.

Thirteen of the study’s 200 original pups from 1987 have shown up at San Miguel this summer to have their first babies.

“In the end, I’ll be able to tell what their lives have been like,” Melin said.

DeLong and Melin are also studying the migration and feeding patterns of sea lions, using satellites to track them and tell how deep they dive to get food. Some dive to 1,300 feet.

“I work, eat dinner and go to bed,” Melin said. “It’s good when I’m out here all alone. I can really focus on what I’m doing.”

As she has watched the same sea lions for months on end, Melin said she has consciously tried not to identify too closely with them.

And she won’t give them names.

“You know them,” she said. “But you have to be careful. You don’t want to get attached. They may swim away and never come back.”