The Daily Bucket is a nature refuge.
We amicably discuss animals, weather, climate, soil, plants, waters and note life’s patterns.
We invite you to note what you are seeing around you in your own part of the world, and to share your observations in the comments below.
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November 11, 2019
Salish Sea, PacificNorthwest
The weather has turned somewhat overcast and sprinkly in the PacificNorthwest lately, which means dark throughout the day, and harder to see what’s going on, including the wildlife. Along with the clouds we’ve had a persistent murky haze over the area due to stagnant atmospheric conditions, quite an unusual situation at this time of year when we’re used to big storms rolling through one after the next with gale winds scouring out particulates and all (it’s been extraordinarily dry for November too, climatically one of our wettest months).
With all this, it’s quite dark out by 4:30pm, as dusk approaches. At a certain point my camera even refuses to take pictures. So any activity I watch at that hour can be a little mysterious! but I can share what I saw the other evening and maybe bucketeers have some ideas to add to mine.
This was happening in the corner of one of our quieter bays. I heard a ruckus of gulls screaming, and saw them flying back and forth on the beach there. I couldn’t get any closer than the edge of the road since the beach is private property and the owners, who run a vacation rental, don’t like people walking on it.
There were half a dozen juvenile gulls, mostly Glaucous-winged, one Mew. One adult GW gull was among them. The adult was calling nonstop. At least one of the juveniles was hunched down and squeaking — that’s their begging behavior.
I’d seen two seals a little ways out, mostly cruising underwater but coming up to breathe and float intermittently. It was dark, as I mentioned, but one of them was Friendly Seal, as her markings indicated. At one point she swam over to the corner of the bay.
The gulls became very excited, lots more calling and hopping and flying short distances. Bashing into each other.
Then a seal powered in toward the shore underwater, raising a bow wave. This is a fishing technique I’ve seen seals do many times, most often toward evening. They drive fish into the trap between the shoaling sandy bottom and the beach, then snapping up the fish that become concentrated in that small space.
The birds were going after the fish too. But not getting too close to the seal. I did see one manage to snatch up a small fish and somebody swallowed it. Too fast to tell who caught it or ate it in the confusion, but the slender few-inches-long silvery body showed up clearly enough against the grey sky/water/gulls to see what it was: a sandlance.
Sandlance are one of several kinds of “baitfish” or “forage fish”, along with herring and surf smelt, that are the bread-and-butter for nearshore marine creatures.
Forage fishes are small schooling fishes that form a critical link in the marine food web between zooplankton and larger fish and wildlife consumers. Status of forage fish populations can be an indicator of the health and productivity of nearshore systems.
(www.eopugetsound.org/...)
I’ve suspected but never actually seen a seal eat forage fish (they swallow underwater) but now I know that’s what they’re driving in when they fish like that. Tonight it was sandlance.
The reason I can’t say that the seal was FS is that (1) the light wasn’t good enough to see markings while it was moving so fast, and (2) the second seal was hanging around right there too. The other seal was a youngster, likely born this past summer judging from its size and shape of face. The fisher could have been either of them.
The seals made several charges into the fish schools. The gulls were watching these maneuvers closely. While the adult gull was savvy about tracking the seal along the shore, the juvenile gulls were all over the place, following each other or the adult, some paddling right out into the water.
At this point my camera refused to take any more pictures here — just too dark. Then remembering how videos always have a lighter exposure than still photos in the same conditions, I turned on the video (anybody else have this experience w still vs video? or know why this happens?)
You can see a mix of seals and gulls in the videos. Movement on the surface was my clue about seal location, gull behavior another. Too often I was searching for activity by the beach and then noticed a seal floating nearby watching all the activity! Only managed to catch one full seal charge on video.
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I have a fairly good idea what was going on with the gulls, although I don’t get why they weren’t more aggressively fishing during the seal charges. Seals toy with gulls and ducks, lurking around behind and under them, even nipping at their feet, but they’re not really food that I know of, around here anyway. But! seals are big carnivores.
Seals are hated and harassed by many fishermen for going after their nets, and for their reputation as competition for salmon (which human fishers consider their property). In fact, harbor seals are generalist and opportunistic hunters, catching whatever is most easily available, which varies by location and season. The only time seals eat salmon is when they are extremely abundant. Research using scat samples shows seals eat at least 60 kinds of prey, including hake, flatfishes, sculpins, herring, smelt, sand lance, surf perch, candlefish, gunnels, rockfish, cod, salmon. Also shrimp, crab, squid, octopus. (www.eopugetsound.org/...). There’s only one documented observation, described as “rare”, of a seal eating a harlequin duck in the literature cited.
What the two seals were doing on this occasion is more mysterious. For one thing, seals tend to be loners, and most of the time Friendly Seal is the only seal in this bay. For another, mother seals leave their pups to fend for themselves once weaned at 6 weeks, which is in August sometime. We know FS had a pup this summer — might this youngster be hers?
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Grey overcast and wet in the PNW islands today. Chilly, temps in the 40s.
What’s up in nature in your area today?
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