Blizzard decimates several seal herds in Canada Fri Feb 3, 8:19 PM ET
OTTAWA (AFP) - Several herds of grey seals were nearly wiped out by a freak blizzard after coming ashore in eastern Canada to escape an unusually mild winter and deliver their offspring this week, officials told AFP.
The seals, which usually give birth on icebergs floating in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, came ashore on Canada's Atlantic coast because warmer than usual weather had melted the ice, fisheries officials said.
But they received a cool welcome.
Some 2,000 to 3,000 seals on tiny Pictou Island were struck by a "severe" storm that buried Canada's eastern Maritimes region in snow and kicked up high waves and strong winds Wednesday and Thursday.
Island resident Jane MacDonald told AFP by telephone that she awoke Thursday morning to see "wall to wall seals" and their puppies on four kilometers (2.5 miles) of beaches "decimated" by the storm.
"It was traumatizing," she said."The seal puppies were literally swept away into the water because their mothers couldn't get them to higher ground."
Mothers nudged their newborn babies to try to keep them afloat. Grey seal pups can swim from birth, but their muscles are weak.
"A wave would hit and the pup went under. The mother pushed it up with her nose, and then another wave would hit. After the sixth or seventh wave, the pup didn't come up," MacDonald said.
"The more you watched, the worse it got. The mothers struggled so hard to save their babies and it just couldn't be done," she said. "I'd never seen anything like that."
Michel Therien, a Canadian fisheries and oceans department spokesman, said "thousands more" seals had landed on a dozen other local islands and Nova Scotia province coasts and suffered the same fate.
He estimates that 75 percent of the grey seal pups born in the region in recent days perished. Many who survived have been orphaned.
But the mass mortalities would likely have little impact on the total grey seal population, which has increased by 10 to 12 percent each year "despite calamities" to about 400,000 animals, Therien said.
The "confused" Pictou Island survivors are now scattered on roads and in ditches, hiding under buildings and in the woods all over the tiny island, some eight kilometers (five miles) long, MacDonald said.
"We can't even plow the fresh snow off the roads now because they're in the way," she said.
Last year, some 200 grey seals came ashore under similar odd weather conditions. It was the first time the island's 18 inhabitants had ever seen them on land.
Most of Canada, well-known for its frosty and long winters, saw a mild winter this year, marked by record-breaking high temperatures across the country.
In Winnipeg, in central Canada, usually one of the coldest cities in the world, the average January temperature was minus 7.3 degrees Celsius, some 10 degrees warmer than normal.
Meteorologists blame the unexpected retreat of cold Arctic air, which normally blankets much of the country in late December through March, allowing warm southern air to circulate.
The exception was Canada's Maritimes region where a blizzard dropped 55 centimeters of snow in just a few hours Thursday morning.
Jane MacDonald's husband is a fisherman who competes with the seals for fish. Both support government-sanctioned culls of harp seals -- about 300,000 killed each March or April -- but this was "a horrible way for (seals) to die," she said.
"It is disturbing to see their remains, a sea of furry white puppies replaced by carcass after carcass all along the beach," MacDonald said.
Fisheries officials noted that grey seals are not usually harvested, but they had planned to allow hunters to kill 2,100 in the coming weeks.
Those numbers are being reviewed in light of "this tragedy," Therien said |
