The Barking Wounded : Wildlife: Animal rescue officers are finding one or more stranded, sick and exhausted sea lions a day on local beaches. They blame El Nino’s tricky currents.

Ventura County animal control officers spent Monday coping with sea lions that were left battered and stranded on the county’s shores by the shifty currents of El Nino.

The officers captured a yearling California sea lion from a Ventura beach and shipped it to Sea World in San Diego for rehabilitation, and just missed netting another sea lion that leaped off the Oxnard dock where it had loitered for three days.

The officers said the strandings were the latest in a string of such incidents that began in May, when the annual pupping season collided with El Nino, a periodically recurring shift in the currents of the Pacific Ocean that scientists blame for heavy seas and a thinner food supply.

County animal control officer Roger Graves said his office is finding one or two sea lions stranded, exhausted or sick on Ventura County beaches each week, and numbers more dead.

“Partially it’s El Nino, and partially the baby seals start to wander away from their parents” during pupping season, which is in full swing on the Channel Islands, Graves said.

The officers usually succeed in chasing 75% of the animals back into the water, but the rest are picked up because they are too exhausted or sick to flee, he said.

“Thank goodness it’s usually the small ones,” Graves said. “I wouldn’t want to hassle with no 200-pound seal.”

Numerous beach residents called the animal control officers about the yearling, a male California sea lion weighing about 42 pounds that had been lying on the Ventura beach since Sunday night, Graves said.

“I guess what made people call was that it had been vomiting,” he said.

The officers netted the animal, and county veterinarian Craig Koerner examined it, but found no obvious wounds or parasites.

“I think he was pretty typical for what we normally see--a runt yearling sea lion,” Koerner said. “It was probably a combination of factors all coming together to cause him to be debilitated enough, weak enough to have to strand.”

The officers dropped the sea lion off at the Organization for Respect and Care of Animals in the Sea on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, where it will be held in a portable kennel until this morning, said Don Zumwalt, ORCAS operations manager.

The yearling then will be taken to a rehabilitation center for sea mammals at Sea World in San Diego, he said. The animal probably will be nursed back to health there for no more than a month, then released to the ocean because marine biologists don’t want rescued animals to become too attached to humans, he said.

The other sea lion, a juvenile weighing about 100 pounds, had been lying on a dock outside Channel Islands Harbor at Oxnard Shores, Graves said.

“He was more or less just sitting there, but a lady said a small boat came by that had a dog on it barking, and (the sea lion) wouldn’t move,” he said. “We tried to catch it and it went back in the water. We told the lady that called in to give us a call if he’s still there.”

Graves warned that no one should try to approach sea lions. They are wild and will bite humans if provoked.

“They do look pretty peaceful when they’re just lying there, but if you do approach them, sometimes they’ll leap right up . . . and go at you,” he said.

FYI

Never approach a sea lion, no matter how young or helpless it looks, animal control officers say. The animals’ bites can be painful and carry infectious bacteria and diseases. If you spot a sea lion lying on the beach or a dock for more than 24 hours or if you see a dead sea lion, call the Ventura County Animal Regulation Dept. at 388-4341.