Your kindness can be deadly to baby seals

Published 10:43 pm Friday, June 15, 2007

It’s the “save me” eyes that do them in.

Undeniably cute, newborn baby seals are often found alone on Puget Sound beaches each summer.

They may look abandoned.

They’re not.

They’re usually resting and warming up while Mom watches nearby.

Harbor seal pups start showing up on beaches along Whidbey and Camano islands and on Snohomish County beaches in June. They can be spotted into September but are most common in July and August.

“Most people want to do the right thing, but they just don’t know what the right thing is,” said Susan Berta, program director for the Whidbey Island-based Orca Network.

Tormented by the need to do something to help, would-be rescuers instead often end up contributing to a young seal’s death.

They pour water on the pups to keep them wet. They drag them back into the water. Or they just touch them to see if they are all right.

Others wrap them in their coats, some going as far as hauling them off to rescue centers. One woman even took a pup home and put it in her bathtub.

The sad truth is that such well-intended rescue attempts often lead to the seals being abandoned by their mothers. Good intentions turn into a death sentence, Berta said.

Even the people who just walk up to get a closer look at a seal make it less likely that its mother will return, or at least delays her return.

Add it up, and human contact is bad news for a species that already only has a 50 percent chance of surviving its first 6 months of life, Berta said.

“The biggest thing we can do is keep our distance, and keep dogs away from them,” she said. The recommended distance is to stay 50 to 100 yards away. “So basically, if they’re on the beach, you should get off.”

As with any wildlife, human intervention usually never helps, especially in the first days of life, said Steve Jeffries, marine mammal research scientist with the state Fish and Wildlife Department.

“The basic message during this critical period when they’ve got their young is, if you separate the baby, you significantly increase the likelihood that that baby is not going to survive,” he said.

Jeffries said baby seals often get left on the beach at low tide so they can rest. He said the mothers stay with them as much as they can, but that they leave when humans approach.

It’s not ideal, but a pup can be separated from its mother for two days and still survive, he said.

“Forty-eight hours is a long time,” said Sandy Dubpernell, principal investigator for the Central Puget Sound Marine Mammal Stranding Network. “By that time, the pup is getting pretty thin and dehydrated.”

It’s crucial to do nothing that extends those periods of natural separation, she said.

Dubpernell said seals need to eat tremendous amounts of fat-laden milk in their first six weeks of life because they will be weaned and left to fend for themselves after that. That makes each nursing opportunity crucial.

“They have to be nice and fat (so they have time to learn) to be good hunters,” she said.

Mothers don’t feed them or teach them how to fish, so presumably it’s only after a lot of trial and error that they learn to catch a meal on their own.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 makes it illegal to kill or harass seals. Removing baby seals from a beach is a violation of that law, as is taking any steps to keep a mother away from its pup, Berta said.

The Central Puget Sound Marine Mammal Stranding Network, which both Dubpernell and Berta work with, has been educating the public about the problem of people trying to save baby seals since 2002.

“Is it working? I do believe so,” Dubpernell said. “I think we’re getting the word out.”

Most people who live on beaches now are aware that they should stay away, she said. In recent years, it’s been beach-house owners who end up protecting seals that show up on private beaches.

For Berta, the goal is still to let the public know that the best way to save seals is to leave them alone.

“The moms and pups know what they’re doing, it just doesn’t always look like it to the human eye,” she said.

Reporter Lukas Velush: 425-339-3449 or lvelush@ heraldnet.com.