Elephant Seals: Field Trip to Ano Nuevo

Click on image to play the video.

In Kenny Howell’s words, they are the most unlikeliest of creatures. A weird evolutionary branching, hunted nearly to extinction, brought back from the brink by the restoration of breeding grounds, such as that at Ano Nuevo State Park, just a short drive south along Highway One.

Last year my daughter's class ventured on a field trip to see the seals and I joined them with my video camera. I’d seen elephant seals only once before--a single, defeated male slumbering a few miles north, nearly dead-like in its mis-scaled largeness, blocking the trail that I and my kids had hoped to take.

The elephant seals are, in one way or another, at the beaches of Ano Nuevo most of the year, not just in the Spring. But it is in the Winter and Springtime when the large males come in to breed and to fight.

There’s violence in the video and some blood. And dead baby seals, run over by the blundering freight train bulls in their battle lust. Life as a seal seems to be nasty, brutish, and short.

The experience is a clear-eyed view of the natural world we don’t often get to see so close to home.

You can see the elephant seals for yourself now through March 31 at Ano Nuevo. Access by permit only (obtain a free permit at the ranger station).

Video by Darin Boville. First published on Coastsider.com
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