Picking fights at Drakes Beach
It’s about halfway through the breeding season for Northern elephant seals and Drakes Beach is the epicenter of the action. It’s a mix of snores at one extreme and bloody fights at the other. The enormous battle-weary alpha males snooze to save energy when everyone is behaving but that wasn’t the case during my last visit. The alpha male had to stay on high alert for rogue males coming close to his harem and trying to mate with the females. It’s a tough job but these big guys are up for it. It helps that they are pumped up on the highest testosterone level of any mammal. The wooden fence at Drakes Beach parking lot felt like a good thing — keeping the fighting at a distance though it’s still close enough to easily watch without binoculars.
On February 20th, I had the privilege of accompanying two Point Reyes park service biologists, Sarah and Aiko, to the Chimney Rock area of Drakes Beach to tag weaned pups and take some samples. I was allowed to go onto the beach at Elephant Seal Overlook, that is, after climbing and sliding down a steep hill including maneuvering around poison oak. My job was to label the samples collected. The biologists were doing nasal swabs on the weaned pups and collecting fecal samples from the ground. The nasal swabs supported flu research at UC Davis, and the fecal samples were to supplement healthy biomes for recovering elephant seals at the Marine Mammal Center. Very messy but also very cool work!
As we approached the trail for the Elephant Seal Overlook, we saw the last throes of a twenty-minute fight between two evenly matched bulls in the water. They were smashing into each other’s chest plates which were bloody from the beatings. Finally, they were both too exhausted to continue and collapsed in the water to cool off from the fighting.
We climbed down the steep hill trying not to slip in the mud or grab onto poison oak. At the beach, we walked quietly along the edge of the water trying not to alarm the seals. Sarah, the park biologist directed me to wait at the cliff side of the beach while she went to do the tagging and swabbing. The trick, I observed, was to approach the weaned pups (aka “weaners” or “weanlings”) quietly to avoid waking them. In theory, you could get a nose swab carefully without waking them and then turn your attention to their tail end to tag them with a tracking number. The tagging device looked like an ear piercer — which is essentially what it is. They place the tag in the thin skin between their flippers. Since the weaners often sleep together, you have to be extra careful to avoid waking the whole pod when tagging one of them. Well, you can imagine how it worked. The first weanling to get tagged howled and barked at the biologists and woke up the rest of the nearby group. They all glared at the biologists, defying them to try to tag them. We had met our match so we moved farther up the beach to the weanlings sleeping peacefully. After tagging and swabbing as many as possible, we wove back through the group being extra cautious around the bulls at the shoreline.
We headed back up the hill and hiked down to the fishdocks for our second group of elephant seals. This group sounded the loudest to me. I’m not sure if it’s because their vocalizations echoed off the surrounding terrain or if they truly were just noisy. I’d like to think they are the extroverted group that likes to talk. We found some good fecal samples in this area. I noticed a male who had just finished mating with a female on shore, about 30 feet from where I was standing. Wowza is all I have to say about that.
I love this time of the season when the weanlings are at their plumpest and simply adorable. As we left the fishdocks, I was full of gratitude for this intimate experience with the elephant seals and the biologists who study and protect them.
Now are you interested in becoming a Winter Wildlife Docent in Point Reyes?
One last thing that’s sure to make you want to join the volunteers next season: Check out Aiko’s weekly elephant seal updates with gorgeous photos and details.
