THE FDR SEAL: SPEEDY BIRTH. 109 



feeding places, yet they reach this land-speck in Bering Sea just in season for instant delivery after 

 arrival! 1 



PANGS OF IMPENDING PARTURITION ALONE PROMPT FEMALES TO LAND. The females do 

 not land until they are obliged to by the precipitation of this event of parturition. They land 

 upon the breeding-grounds of Saint Paul just as they coine in contact with the shore guided and 

 influenced at the moment of approach to the islands by only one ruling thought, and that is, to 

 reach as near as possible the locality upon which they resided in former years. Soon after lauding, 

 which I have heretofore described, the birth of the young takes place, and in this wise: the cow 

 shows, an hour or so prior to delivery, great nervous agitation; she trembles all over; her eyes 

 blinking, and flippers twitching; rolling, stretching, and thoroughly uneasy, until the labor-pains. 

 If the ground where she happens to rest is rocky, she manages to lie upon the top of a bowlder, 

 her hind-flippers working spasmodically with a wavy, fan-like motion backward and forward, as 

 she rests full upon her stomach, with the fore-flippers alternately pressed tightly to the rock or 

 closely to her sides, like pectoral tins; she sways her head, her eyes are partly closed and her 

 mouth slightly opened in panting, during the fifteen or twenty minutes which usually ensue 

 between the first contraction of the uterus, until the expulsion of the intra-uterine life takes place. 

 These labor-pains are not, in my opinion, at all very severe or abnormal in any respect. The pup 

 carries with it, at the moment of birth, the entire placental pouch or "after-birth." This envelope 

 is broken, usually by the mother, in forcing the labor and during the first expulsion of the pup's 

 head, which is always presented in advance. The little "Kotick" may be said to fairly drop upon 



' If there is any one faculty better developed than the others in the brain of the intelligent Callorhinus, it must be 

 its ''bump" of locality. The unerring directness with which it pilots its annual course back through thousands of 

 miles of watery waste to these spots of its birth small fly-dots of land in the map of Bering Sea and the North 

 Pacific is a very remarkable exhibition of its skill in navigation. While the Russians were established at Bodega 

 and Ross, California, sixty years ago, they frequently shot Fur Seals at sea, wh'en hunting tin- Sea Otter off the coast 

 between Fuca Straits and the Farallones. Many of these animals, late in May and early in Juue, were so far advanced 

 in pregnancy that it was deemed certain by their captors that some shore must be close at hand upon which the near 

 impending birth of the pup took place ; thereupon, the Russians searched over every rod of the coast-line of the main- 

 land and the archipelago, between California and the peninsula of Alaska, vainly seeking everywhere there for a fur- 

 seal rookery. They were slow to understand how animals, so close to the throes of parturition, could strike out into 

 broad ocean to swim fifteen hundred or two thousand miles withiu a week or ten days ere they landed on the Pribylov 

 group, and almost immediately after gave birth to their offspring. 



There is no record made which shows that the Fur Seals have any regular or direct course of travel tip or down the 

 northwest coast. They are principally seen in the open sea, eight or ten miles from laud, outside the heads of the 

 Straits of Fuca, and from there as far north as Dixon Sound. During May and June they are aggregated in greatest 

 numbers here, though examples are reported the whole year around. The only Fur Seal which I saw, or which was 

 noticed by the crew of the Reliance, in her cruise, June 1 to 9, from Port Townseml to Sitka, was a solitary "Hollu- 

 schack" that we disturbed at sea well out from the lower end of Queen Charlotte's Island; then, from Sitka to Kadiak, 

 we saw nothing of the Fur Seal until we hauled off from Point Greville, and coming down by Ookamok Islet, a squad 

 of agile "Holluschickie" suddenly appeared among a school of hump-back whales, sporting in the most extravagant 

 manner around, under, and even leaping over the wholly indifferent cetuci-a. From this eastern extremity of Kadiak 

 Island elear up to the Pribylov group we daily saw them here and there in small bands, or also as lonely voyageurs, 

 all headed for one goal. We were badly outsailed by them ; indeed, the chorus of a favorite "South Sea pirate's" 

 sung, as incessantly sung on the cutter's "'tween decks," seemed to Lave special adaptation to them : 



"For they bore down from the windwi'anl, 

 A sailin' seven knots to oar fonr'n." 



The ancient Greeks seemed to have been impressed somewhere by rookery odors, for old Homer says 



"The web-footed seals forsake th** stormy swell, 

 And, sleeping in herds, exhale nanseona smell." 



Where this illustrious bard sniffed up this characteristic unpleasantness of breeding-seals, I am at loss to i-ay. 

 The Pribylov Islands and the great Antarctic grounds wen- .-..-, Jar Iron) that poet then as the moon is from us to-day. 

 Fie must have been introduced to it within the confines of the Caspian Sea, or else- credibly informed, by trustworthy 

 authority, of this peculiarity of the large herds of r/iocirfn- in those waters. Small bands, however, of Hair Seals breed 

 now, as they bred then, in the Mediterranean and Black Seas. He may have stumbled upon a few of them while 

 provoking his muse in lonely travels over Grecian pelagic shouts 



