1918] The Ottawa Naturalist. 141 



suffer from the weather and also many parasitic diseases, and greatly 

 from depredations of crows and magpies. In Okanagan these get 

 nearly all the first layings of Prairie chickens, while the herbage 

 is still short. 



THE FUR SEALS* 



Although the natives of the Aleutian Islands have a tradition 

 that fur-seals once bred there, no fur-seal remains or other facts have 

 been discovered which warrant the belief that they ever came ashore 

 anywhere else in the North Pacific except on the Commander and 

 Pribiloff groups of islands or on a few small islands and reefs in 

 Japanese waters, where they were undisturbed by man, for when 

 discovered all the breeding places of the fur-seals were on islands 

 which showed no evidence of ever having been visited by even 

 aboriginal man. 



Both the main groups of breeding islands, although many hun- 

 dreds of miles apart, are washed by the waters of the warm Japanese 

 Current, and that part of Bering Sea is for several months in the 

 summer almost continually drenched with fog, many weeks some- 

 times passing without a glimpse of the sun. On these foggy beaches 

 and along the bases of cliffs the fur-seals breed in literally countless 

 thousands, as many as 4,000,000 having been estimated as being on 

 the Pribiloff islands in a single season; indeed Lieut. Maynard, who 

 visited the islands for the U.S. Government in 1872, estimated the 

 total number in that year to be nearly 6,000,000. These figures are 

 greatly overestimated as when actual counts of the seals were made in 

 later years, the numbers were found to be much less than anyone 

 would have believed from simply looking at them, although in 1897, 

 after many years of destructive killing, there were still nearly a 

 million seals on the islands of St. Paul and St. George. Whatever 

 the greatest number may have been at any particular time, the records 

 show that up to 1889 there had been actually shipped no less than 

 4,439,000 skins of young male fur-seals. 



There can be no doubt that with the adequate protection that is 

 now being given the fur-seals, both at sea and on land, they will 

 ultimately increase to their former numbers. In 1914, nearly 300,000 

 seals were estimated as being on the islands, and the present rate of 

 annual increase is over 15 per cent. This percentage will increase as 

 conditions become more nearly normal. 



Following a brief historical statement of the Bering Sea Fur Seal 

 controversy, Mr. Macoun showed an instructive series of lantern 



*From a lecture on The Fur-Seals, by Mr. James M. Macoun, C.M.G., 

 before the O.F.N. Club, March 5, 1918. 



