Elephant Seal Overlook Trail

Elephant Seal Overlook Trail
.5 miles
1 hour
Start: Chimney Rock Parking Lot
End: Chimney Rock Parking Lot
Includes: Elephant Seal Overlook Trail, Elephant Seal Overlook

Hike 57
December 17, 2013

To get to the Elephant Seal Overlook Trail, I parked in the Chimney Rock parking lot near the south end of the Point Reyes peninsula. When I arrived, the parking lot was empty.

On weekends and holidays in December this place is so busy that Sir Francis Drake Boulevard is closed at the Drakes Beach turnoff. Everyone has to park near the Kenneth C. Patrick Visitor Center, get tickets and take a shuttle bus to the point.

The attractions are the Northern elephant seals who are here to have pups and to mate. Also, gray whales can be seen from near the lighthouse on their annual migration south to Baja to bear their young.

As it was on this mid-week visit, the overlook platform was empty. Drakes Bay was smooth. I lay down on the bench and listened to the elephant seals manage their domestic affairs.

These creatures spend most of the year in open ocean. Females go toward Hawaii to feed and males toward Alaska. When it nears pupping time the males show up first to stake a claim on the beach. A week or so later the females begin to arrive and choose a spot on the beach. With this arrangement, females choose their mate. A male may end up with a harem of up to 100 females! He spends his time and energy protecting his territory from interloping males.

To save energy, the male is equipped with a big elephant nose. It allows him to definitively announce his aggressive intentions to another male. Often the sound is enough to instigate retreat. If it is not, a mighty battle ensues. With a swinging head, the male gnashes his big teeth (usually hidden under his dangling nose) into the breast plate of his opponent.  Full grown males develop a chest shield to protect them in these battles. Most large males spend the season scarred and bloodied, although the fights are rarely to the death.

Females give birth to one pup each, which weighs up to 80 lbs at birth. The black pup spends the next month resting and nursing next to mom. As the pup fattens from the milk, mom shrinks. She can lose up to 30% of her body weight during this month, since she is fasting.

After about a month she gets ready to wean the pup and head out to sea to eat. Just before she leaves, she mates with the male of her harem. In order for the baby to be born at the right time next year, implantation of the fertilized egg inside the female is delayed as long as necessary. This allows all Northern elephant seal babies to be born around the same time regardless of whether mating happened early or late in the season.

The fattened pups loll on the beach together as their parents swim away. They keep each other company and learn to swim before heading out to sea themselves for their first time. It is a mystery how they learn to navigate in the absence of experienced adults. The seals will return to the beach again in the spring to molt. They lose all their hair and the water is mighty cold, so they wait around on land until the transformation is complete and head back out to sea.

Male elephant seals can dive up to 5,000 feet and hold their breath for 90 minutes. In the deep ocean they find food no one else is after for example, giant squid. When they need a nap, they close their nostrils, stop breathing and sleep under water for short periods.

Northern elephant seals were almost extinct. For about a 15-year period in the mid-1800's people were hacking and slashing them for their blubber, which they used to grease mechanical parts. In the 1920's a few remaining seals were found on an island and Mexico was the first country to ban hunting (1922). The US followed.

Northern elephant seals have made a great comeback and are now under threat only by hunters in countries they encounter on their far away swims and by a limitation in habitat; a 5,000 pound mating male can ruin a perfectly good beach picnic! Also, dogs freak them out.

Standing at the edge of the platform, I marveled at their amazing adaptations which include:

Long noses capable of making sounds to scare away challengers.

Delayed implantation of fertilized eggs to allow all babies to be born on the beach at the same time.

Pups being born heat-absorbing black because they are born without blubber to keep them warm. They molt after a month of fattening up to a lighter color to cool down.

Closeable nostrils and sleep apnea to sleep under water while in the open ocean.

Heat shunting in their capillaries to allow heat to be centralized in their core when diving deep and to their extremities to cool down on land.

This is just the beginning; they are really amazing creatures and we almost killed them off. I used to wonder what the big deal was about losing species. For humans the value of a species is usually determined by whether it can be eaten or sold.

The big deal about the loss of species is that these creatures are part of the fabric of our existence. We did not just pop onto earth independent of the web of life. We were formed within it. With each species extinction, we are pulling a thread from the weave. At the rate we are going, the web which cradles us all will become so threadbare we will fall through. What exists outside of it is open space: nothingness.

What we have now is unfathomably beautiful. Each creature is a thread in the web of life. Each creature is perfectly adapted to its particular set of circumstances. No other creature could fill the Northern elephant seal's exact niche. Life's purpose is to live. Life does that by filling in the gaps with threads of intricate perfection. Taken together, we are strong. Divide us, we are weak. We need each other as reminders of ourselves, of our own rich history and heritage as unique creatures who rely on each other for life.