Seals & Whales on Coastline of NYC

[Kris]

February 29, 2004

Hanging Out or Left High and Dry, the Seals Are Back

By COREY KILGANNON

On Wednesday morning, Carol Nagy, 33, was walking on a pier at the World's Fair Marina, just north of Shea Stadium, when she spied an unusual visitor lounging on the fuel dock: a young hooded seal basking in the winter sun.

"I've worked here 10 years, and I've never seen a seal," said Ms. Nagy, 33, a sales manager for the Skyline Princess, a luxury charter yacht docked at the marina.

The seal gazed across choppy Flushing Bay at a Home Depot store on the opposite shore and seemed oblivious to the roar of traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway and the low-flying planes landing at LaGuardia Airport.

A seal in city waters? Matt Symons, deputy director for the City Parks Department's Urban Park Rangers stared at the seal and said that such sightings had become more common. And local biologists say that seal populations in New York-area waters are rising dramatically after a century of dwindling numbers. Besides a steady increase over the last five years, there is a startling number of sightings and rescue calls this winter, they say. More and more seals can be found on the rocky coasts of Connecticut, lolling on Long Island shoals and loafing on New Jersey beaches. Seal-watching tours are held on Long Island and Connecticut.

"The trends are off the scale right now," said Kim Durham, a biologist at the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation on Long Island, referring to seal sightings and calls for rescue. Most calls are for stranded or harp seals, which beach themselves when they are suffering from malnourishment, dehydration, parasite infections or respiratory problems.

The foundation has rescued 26 seals and 4 sea turtles this winter. They are kept in individual tanks for rehabilitation and eventual release, usually within a month or two.

The foundation's director, Robert DiGiovanni, said that in a survey he conducted in a small Cessna airplane one day last month, he counted 700 seals on the East End of Long Island.

From December through May, the waters around the New York area get an influx of four major types of seals - harbor, harp, gray and hooded seals. The harbor seals, often from the Maine coast, are the most common locally. They have whitish fur with dark spots and grow up to six feet long. The long-snouted gray seal, often from Nantucket, can grow up to seven feet. The harp seals, indigenous to Arctic waters, are silvery with black heads and can grow up to six feet.

"We have seals all over the place this year," said Robert C. Schoelkopf, the founding director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine, N.J. "It's a real busy year for us," he said. "You have seals up in Connecticut and Long Island, all up and down the coast. We thought it had stabilized this year, but now it's going up again."

Mr. Schoelkopf said that his small staff had run 80 rescues this winter, possibly his highest total ever by late February. Staff members also rescue dolphins, porpoises and sea turtles.

On Friday, he said, a 53-foot fin whale was rescued in Port Elizabeth. Yesterday, he received a call about a three-foot-long healthy harp seal that had swum 53 miles up the Delaware River. "It was healthy, but you had people throwing rocks at it and others feeding it sushi," he said. "There were news camera crews shining lights on it. We had to rescue him."

"You always have people who want to pet or take pictures with them, and that's harassment," Mr. Schoelkopf added.

Seal populations around Long Island have increased by 3 to 6 percent annually over the past few years, said Samuel S. Sadove, a biologist who tracks marine mammals on Long Island. This is mostly because the overall seal population has increased in the northwest Atlantic over the last two decades after seals became a protected species in 1972, and environmental awareness among the public increased.

Seals tend to go unnoticed because they seek out unpopulated places, Mr. Sadove said. Seals were plentiful locally a century ago, when schools of dolphins roamed the Long Island Sound and some of the world's best whale hunting was done off Eastern Long Island, he said. But hunting and development of coastal areas decreased populations. Seal numbers dropped further in the 1970's when many died from influenza and in the 1980's, when they were stricken with distemper infection.

"You have to realize that as recently as the 1950's a seal spotted on Long Island was still considered food," Mr. Sadove said.

Mr. Sadove said he had done fly-over censuses by plane, and even counted 2,000 seals at one time over one island cluster on the East End. He would not say where exactly, because, "Public awareness is a double-edged sword."

"I've seen people swimming out with dogs to haul-out sites near the Montauk Lighthouse," he said, "and I've done walking tours to sites, only to come back and find that it caused the seals to abandon the area."

Amy Ferland, harbor seal census researcher at the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, Conn., estimated that there were 3,000 seals in Long Island Sound, and noted increases this winter in areas off the coast of Westchester and Connecticut, including New Rochelle and Stamford. "We're certainly seeing more species, and there are more sightings," she said. "There are more seals and a greater awareness that they're out there. A lot of people are going out on the tours."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[NYatKNIGHT]

Downtown Express
Feb. 25-Mar. 3, 2005

Seals frolic in North Cove

By Josh Rogers






http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_94/seal.gif
Downtown Express photos by Robert Stolarik






Above, this seal is undoubtedly a more rare harp seal, according to a marine rescuer with the Riverhead Foundation.
The other seal who swam in the icier part of the water is also likely to be a harp.



http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_94/seal1.gif

It was a typical weekend in Battery Park City with many mammals visiting the neighborhood and enjoying the Hudson River, but instead of walking, two of them swam in and stayed in the water — delighting the two-legged creatures watching from the land.

Two seals splashed around in North Cove Marina for over an hour on Saturday, and perhaps they were the same ones who returned to the cherished spot Sunday.


More and more seals are being spotted in New York Harbor and a cleaner Hudson River, but the B.P.C. frolic was unusual for two reasons: the seals got so close to humans for such a long time in the Hudson River, and the seals were in all likelihood not the somewhat more common harbor seals, but appeared to be rarer harp seals.


“That’s a great sighting,” said Dave Taft, district ranger for the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Taft was most impressed that it looked to be harps, but he acknowledged that seeing any seal so close near the Hudson was unusual. Different people knowledgeable about marine harbor life interviewed for this article split between what was most noteworthy about the event. Visitors to North Cove Saturday who were either there for a free model boat program or were just passing by, watched with wonder.


“The seals seemed really interested in being observed,” said Ted Wallace, a certified sailing captain who saw them Saturday and Sunday. “They would come up close and look at people and they would roll over and dive into the water.”


Wallace, a member of the Manhattan Sailing Club, was running the club’s new Laser boat race program in which visitors can power remote control model boats for free. He said he has been noticing seals more and more on the rocks near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge while sailing, but he had not seen them in the marina before last weekend.


Taft said it is hard to tell if harp seals are happy, but it is easy to understand why many people think they are. “They look like they’re smiling — they look like a puppy,” he said.


He and others describe the seals as curious in the right situation.


“In their own element, they tend to be very curious and will approach vessels and surfers,” said Kim Durham, who directs the Riverhead Foundation’s marine rescue program. She said seal sightings are way up on the ocean shores and beaches of Long Island but long Hudson River looks are much less common. She encourages people who see seals to call the foundation’s hotline, 631-369-9829, so that her group can collect more information about seal activity and have a history if a particular seal is hurt.


http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_94/seal2.gif

Durham, who looked at Downtown Express photos of the seals, said they were probably between 12 and 16 months old and the one who stayed further away from the crowd was definitely a harp seal. The friendlier one who swam near the ice also looked to be a harp, but Durham could not be certain without seeing more of his or her body. She could not tell the sex of either seal. Harps typically grow to be about 6 feet tall and 300 pounds and the B.P.C. visitors were only a few feet long.


So what drew the seals to B.P.C. and are they likely to return? At least two theories emerged from neighborhood people who had heard about it.


Wallace says the water is warmer in the marina and noticed the seals stayed in the warmest part of the cove, the southeast section near a PATH commuter train tunnel to the World Trade Center stop nearby. He thinks the warmth was what attracted them and they may return a lot before the big sailing boats come back to the harbor in the spring.


Michael Fortenbaugh, the sailing club’s commodore, who recently started running the marina as well, said the seal sightings were a “miracle” and “a sure sign that someone is smiling on North Cove.” He suggested the seals were drawn to see the model boats on the first day of the program and perhaps because they heard the news that yachting champion Dennis Conner is one of Fortenbaugh’s new partners running the marina. Marine analysts of course did not touch the second half of the theory but they did think there maybe something to the first.


John Waldman, a Queens College biology professor who authored a book about Hudson River marine life, said seals often “haul out” or come out of the water onto ice so he doesn’t think warmth brought them to B.P.C. “They may have sensed these boats and were curious to see them,” said Waldman.


Regardless of whether he was right or not, the seals were a happy weekend surprise for Wallace: “Life is coming back in the Hudson.”




http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_94/sealfrolicinnorth.html

[Kris]

March 3, 2005

New York Greets a Visitor With Love (and Raw Fish)

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/03/03/nyregion/03seals_lg.jpg
A harp seal, probably a migrant from the Arctic, has been staying on a floating dock in the Hudson this week.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/d.gifiana dos Santos stamped and hooted and hollered toward the water off Pier 25.

"Come on, baby! Look over here! Come on!"

More entreaties followed, each directed at the sausage-shaped aquatic mammal lazing a few feet offshore on a floating dock covered in snow, not far from Battery Park City, onto which it had climbed. Bribery - a whole red snapper bought at Food Emporium and tossed gently onto the platform - had failed. Now she tried love.

"Hi there! Hi cutie!"

Finally, the four-foot-long creature, a young harp seal, rolled on its side, favoring Ms. dos Santos, who works at the River Project, a nonprofit ecological research and educational organization located on Pier 26, with a drowsy stare.

"There we go," she said, sighing contentedly.

"If this were summer, we'd have hundreds of people here looking. But in the winter, right after a snowstorm, it's just the lucky few."

The seal, which was first spotted earlier this week, had a number of visitors in addition to Ms. dos Santos on Tuesday afternoon. Some of them were drawn by word of mouth; others ambled over from the nearby bike path to see why people were standing in the cold on a slushy pier during rush hour.

"It's amazing to see a seal out there," said Joan Isbister, who runs a personnel consulting firm in Chelsea. "I've seen all sorts of interesting birds down here, but never anything like this."

Jim Wetteroth, who runs the Downtown Boathouse, which uses the platform during the warmer months to launch kayaks and sailboats, agreed. "I've seen them further out on the water, but never on our dock," he said. "They're not supposed to like to be around people."

One spectator, Jennifer Derovach, a dog walker, heard about the seal from a friend at the Bronx Zoo, where she is a volunteer. So she steered her three charges for the day - a husky, a golden retriever and a Shiba Inu - toward the Hudson River to take a look. Her verdict? "He's cute," she said. The dogs did not register any opinion.

Sometimes the seal writhed and played on the dock, presumably the closest thing to an ice floe that downtown Manhattan has to offer. Most of the time it slept.

A pair of harp seals was sighted last weekend in the North Cove Marina, a few blocks south; it is not clear whether the one now ensconced near Pier 25, near North Moore Street, was one of them. Biologists said visits by such seals were not uncommon in the New York area.

"Young harp and hooded seals are the most commonly reported stranded or beached marine mammals these days," said Greg Early, a marine mammal biologist who works with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Although the animal's traditional habitat is the Arctic, he said, "they have been showing up for the last 10 or 15 years further and further south - inhabited harbors, open beaches, people's backyards, you name it."

A few years ago, he said, a harp seal made it all the way up the Hudson River to Albany. "So on the scale of strange things, you've got something in the middling range," he said.

Scientists are not yet sure why the seals - usually juveniles - began coming south in greater numbers.

Kimberly Durham, who runs the rescue program at the Riverhead Foundation, which handles marine mammal strandings in New York State, said her group logged more than 100 calls about stranded seals, most of them harp seals, this year.

So far this year, the foundation has assisted 46 seals, including a number of harps, at its treatment center on Long Island - double the number in the same period last year.

City park rangers paid a visit to the pier on Tuesday to make sure that the seal was not in danger, and sent digital photos of it to Ms. Durham, who said the animal appeared to be in good shape.

"It hasn't completed its molt yet," she explained. (Harp seals molt, or replace their fur, once a year.) "Oftentimes they will not eat much while they're molting. The animal that is out on Pier 26 appears a little on the thin side, but not enough to be concerned."

The animals, which are not considered endangered, are protected in the United States under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

"The idea is you're not allowed to kill, injure or harass these animals," said Mr. Early. "Harass is on the vaguer end of the spectrum, but that includes scaring it or chasing it off from where it wants to be."

Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[antinimby]

Baby whale stranded in Brooklyn canal


BY SOPHIA CHANG

April 17, 2007 (http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-nywhal0418,0,3340144.story), 3:24 PM EDT

A baby whale was stranded in Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal Tuesday afternoon, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

The baleen whale was spotted near 22nd Street in the morning, and its condition was unknown, said Steve Sapp, chief warrant officer for the U.S. Coast Guard.

Experts from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, as well as from the Riverhead Foundation, were to assess the whale's condition with an underwater listening device, Sapp said.

While it was unknown why or how the baby whale entered the Gowanus Canal, Sapp said it was the first time in his five years he's seen a baleen whale in New York's harbors. "It may be isolated, it may have gotten separated from its mother," he said.

Baleen whales differ from toothed whales in that they have a series of comb-like spires known as baleen that hang down from the roof of their mouth. As they swim open-mouthed through the water, taking in the fluid, the tiny zooplankton upon which they feed become stuck in the baleen. Humpback, North Atlantic and Fin whales are all baleen whales. Sperm and Killer whales are toothed whales, or Odonteceti.

Copyright Newsday Inc.

[antinimby]

From WNBC (http://www.wnbc.com/news/12288867/detail.html)...

http://www.wnbc.com/2007/0417/12291148.jpg

[MidtownGuy]

Sad. I wonder how it became separated from the mother.

[Punzie]

From WNBC (http://www.wnbc.com/news/12288867/detail.html)...

As The Great Lofter sometimes says, "News articles have a way of disappearing from the links." Ergo, I am posting the news in full (from WCBStv):


Whale Spotted In Gowanus Bay Dies

Apr 19, 2007

(CBS/AP) BROOKLYN A young whale thrashed the water, beached itself at an oil depot dock and died suddenly on Wednesday after two days of swimming aimlessly in a small bay off an industrial section of Brooklyn.

Animal activists said the minke whale, about a year old, had been too young to survive on its own.

"It's very sad," said Kim Durham, a rescue specialist at the Long Island-based Riverhead Foundation for Research and Preservation, who had monitored the troubled animal's activities around the clock. "It was a very young whale that became confused and disoriented."

Earlier, experts had reported seeing nothing to indicate the mammal was sick, such as swimming erratically or in tight circles. With only the whale's dorsal fin visible at times, observers could only guess whether it might have been injured.

Durham had expressed hope earlier that the whale would find its way back into open water in New York harbor. But she said the situation took a bad turn in the early afternoon, when the whale's swimming patterns changed.

Durham said a colleague, marine biologist Robert DiGiovanni, was observing the animal when "it suddenly began heavy splashing, hit the dock and then just went quiet."

The whale died about 5 p.m. The end was witnessed by spectators who had been drawn to the dock area in Gowanus Bay by news accounts of the whale.

A police harbor boat secured the whale's carcass, estimated to weigh about 3,500 to 5,000 pounds, to the Hess Oil Co. dock, where it remained overnight. It was to be towed to an Army Corps of Engineers dock at Caven Point, in Jersey City, N.J., on Thursday for a necropsy by Riverhead marine experts, according to Peter Shugert, a Corps spokesman.

Durham had said earlier that "something's not right" about the whale's condition and where it was.

"It would be great if we could say to the whale, `Say, "Ahhh," and stick your tongue out,"' she said.

The whale was first spotted on Tuesday in Gowanus Bay, a small estuary off industrial south Brooklyn that is the outlet from the Gowanus canal, a narrow 1.2-mile waterway once lined with pollution-generating coal yards, scrap yards and small industries.

The canal has improved in recent years due to environmental cleanup efforts. After a huge underwater fan, designed to keep the water flowing, was reactivated, crabs and other marine creatures began turning up. But Robert Guskind, founder of Gowanuslounge.com, said the recent major storm would have sent more raw sewage into the canal.

He said the whale story had generated a lot of traffic on his Web site, which is about life and real estate development in Brooklyn.

"People are concerned about the creature's ability to survive," he said. "Quite honestly it could not have picked a worse spot."

Guskind and Durham disputed media reports that the animal was ever inside the canal proper.

"I don't know how that got started," Durham said. "I was there with it all day, and I was never in the canal. One of our concerns is that it might try to go there. There would be no way to prevent it."

Guskind's site included a map showing the whale in an area, often called Gowanus Bay, beyond a highway bridge that spans the canal exit.

Like the Gowanus canal, the outlet is lined with docks, storage warehouses and a large fuel oil depot, but it has enough room for a whale to turn around in its 30-foot depths. The canal is shallower and so narrow that a large mammal might have problems making a U-turn.

Minke whales are a subspecies of baleen whales, common in northern Atlantic waters, and feed on plankton and krill. They are not known for singing like their cousins the humpback whales. Underwater listening devices picked up only a few "grunts" in the Gowanus waters, Durham said.

Durham was uncertain whether underwater sounds could have been used to coax or drive the whale back into the open harbor.

In some cases, lost or trapped whales flee at the recorded sounds of killer whales, but Durham said that wouldn't have worked in this case.

"Whales like this one have never heard that sound," she said. "They wouldn't know what it was."

http://wcbstv.com/pets/local_story_109090011.html


Researchers: Whale Found In Brooklyn Was A Female

April 21, 2007

(CBS/AP) NEW YORK A baby whale that died in a remote backwater of New York Harbor was a female, experts said after an examination. But they remained unsure why the animal died.

"Unfortunately, I can't say, 'Okay, this is what happened,"' said Kim Durham, rescue program director for the Long Island-based Riverhead Foundation for Research and Preservation.

The whale's belly had shown a number of bloody scratches, as though she had scraped herself on the bottom or underwater obstacles. But no signs of significant trauma were found during a seven-hour necropsy, researchers said Friday.

They planned to send tissue samples to pathologists for more tests...


Source and remainder of the story (mostly background):

http://wcbstv.com/local/local_story_111090659.html

[Punzie]

Whale carcass taken to Jersey City for necropsy (http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070420/NEWS03/704200392)


The baby female whale's body, weighing @3500-5000 pounds,
was pulled out of Brooklyn bay on 4/19 by a crane from the
ship behind it -- then transported to New Jersey.
http://msnbcmedia2.msn.com/j/ap/e0918251-152b-4d4f-8825-e621ae881763.hmedium.jpg
Dima Gavrysh / AP

[Punzie]

It was last reported that the Long Island-based Riverhead Foundation for Research and Preservation was about to perform a necropsy on the whale in Jersey City. My searches haven't found a report on the necropsy.

Does anybody know if a report has come out yet? (JCMAN?)