Elephant Seal Fight to the Death!

Today at Ano Nuevo State Park, I decided to tempt the fates and traverse the sandy dunes of elephant seal territory. The sky was a bit overcast, mild temperatures, with a slight wind blowing the scent of the salt sea up to us on the cliffs above the beach where elephant seals had come to give birth to their pups. After the pups are weaned, the female elephant seals will mate with the alpha male that effectively owns the group she is part of (a harem). He earns the right to mate with his group of females by fighting violently with many other males, quite bloody battles, we're told. From our initial vantage point, we could not see elephant seals but we could hear them bugling. The sound is so powerful that it travels for a mile. The gulls soared up from the beach into the sun and I stopped to admire them. 

We rounded the bend and reached the site where we picked up our docent, Nancy. We have to be very careful walking through elephant seal territory as the males can get up to 16 feet long and can weight up to 2 1/2 tons!! However, our docent is highly trained in seal-fu and here she is showing us her skills. I lost all fear when I saw her form.

 Before we arrived in elephant seal territory, Nancy gave us all sorts of information about the natives who used migrate to the coastal areas for winter and then return to the mountains in summer. The Ohlone, the natives of this region, would burn their homes before they returned to the mountains - extreme spring cleaning because of flea infestation. Fantastic. Which had absolutely nothing to do with elephant seals. So back to them. The gents arrive in December at Ano Nuevo and the ladies follow shortly thereafter. The ladies give birth to their pups, nurse their lazy butts for 28 days and then kick 'em to the curb.

 As mentioned before, the seals mate and then a year later, pups are born. What? Pregnancy for a year?!! Nope, some weird science for you, turns out the ladies don't eat the whole time they are on land - several months - so their malnourished forms can't sustain an embryo until after they are out at sea and feeding. Gestation for an elephant seal then only lasts 7 months.

Above I am standing in front of an old lightkeeper's house and a couple of elephant seal harems with lots of pups you can't see. New Year's resolution - buy a new camera. So after all the excitement of evading giant males that can move at up to 8 miles per hour, we took a casual stroll on the beach to relax and let the adrenaline wane. 

We rounded a bend and what do we see?! An elephant seal! And we are alone - no seal-fu master to protect us, just two wandering ladies, with zero seal-fu training. We gave this fellow a wide berth, skirting carefully as close to the water as possible and as far away from his giant head as we could! He didn't even lift his head up though, so we feared him for nothing.

Then there were some bird tracks but I'm not afraid of those thanks to years of training in bird-fu. 

So, nobody died today. Win!