October 25th, 2006
sea lions
As mentioned before, I’ll be doing a lot of jumping around for the next while — writing about travels in the west, and about baking pies or making bread, and probably about other things like shopping bags, documentary movies, and definitely how much I *hate* airports and flying (none of the above in any particular order). I even have a few insect posts left to write before the snow flies. Stay tuned. In the meantime, here’s today’s offering. I’m jumping back to the California coast for this one. And yes, it was another “first” for me. First time to see Sea Lions outside of a zoo when I was a kid.
These Sea Lions were photographed at Crescent City where a population of them seems to hang out on some floating docks in the harbour. I stopped to watch them on two occasions, and during the day, they seem to lie about basking in the sun. They’re also very vocal. I’ve uploaded a little MP4 movie clip of them so that you can hear them for yourself. The barking seemed to go on fairly constantly, even at night. In fact, Don and I stayed at a motel not far from the harbour for a couple of nights and the barking went on all night – interspersed with the local fog horn.
We also heard Sea Lions while camped in the forests high above the ocean at Patrick’s Point State Park. During the night, their voices carried up to the woods and was not at all unpleasant to me, perhaps because it was an interesting new sound.
As you might well guess, I know very little about Sea Lions, so can’t really tell you much about them. According to my Audubon Field Guide to North American Mammals, there are two species of Sea Lions that seem to frequent the California coast — California (Zalophus californianus) and Stellar, or Northern Sea Lion (Eumetopias jubatus). Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think all of the ones that we saw in northern California would have been Stellar Sea Lions — at least, from what I can tell from comparing my photos to those in one of my field guides (head shape and coloration seem similar). My field guide also says that Sea Lions are very fast swimmers — up to 25 miles per hour, and can dive to depths well exceeding 400 feet while hunting for fish, squid, octopus, and other marine creatures.
Tags: Sea Lions, Stellar Sea Lion, Eumetopias jubatus, California Sea Lion, Zalophus californianus