1899] THE HABITS OF THE NORTHERN FUR SEAL 37 



all, snap at him with great severity, and so lie goes on until his own 

 mother, landing on the beach, at once commences " baaing " for him, 

 and the pup, if he is within hearing, recognises her voice and answers 

 the call, and the meeting of mother and child is obviously one of mutual 

 recognition and great pleasure. Sometimes, however, the foolish pups 

 stray away to other ground, where their mothers have great difficulty 

 in finding them, or perhaps do not find them at all, and, as no other 

 mother will take pity on them and feed them, their little starved 

 carcases, pressed flat by the flippers of their comrades, sadden the eyes 

 of the visitor to the rookery. 



Food. 



It is a strange thing that scarcely anything can be found in the 

 stomachs of the seals on shore, whether males, females, or any but the 

 youngest pups. The reason seems to be a twofold one, namely that 

 the seals commonly feed at such a great distance from the rookery that 

 their stomachs are empty by the time they return to shore, and secondly, 

 that, even if they feed at no great distance from the rookery, they 

 seem to prefer to sleep off the effect of a heavy meal on the surface of 

 the water, which they find no doubt a far softer and pleasanter bed 

 than the hard rocks on shore. Thus even the older pups, if killed on 

 shore, are usually found to have empty stomachs, and to get one with 

 a full stomach a search must be made among those asleep in the water 

 off the rookery. 



The habit of feeding far out at sea is adhered to with strange 

 persistence by the fur seals, insomuch so that the pelagic sealers 

 have found them plentiful at sea in August off the Commander Islands, 

 in localities distant from 100 to nearly 200 miles from the rookeries. 

 Yet, except in the immediate vicinity of the rookery beaches them- 

 selves, seals are rarely to be seen in the neighbourhood of the islands, 

 except perhaps in one or two favoured localities where fish seem to be 

 abundant. At the Saranna river, which enters the sea at a distance 

 of about seven miles from the north rookery of Bering's Island, 

 great numbers of salmon are caught annually, yet it is said that the 

 seals never interfere with the salmon and are never seen in the 

 neighbourhood of the river's mouth. 



It is not, however, an invariable rule that seals killed on shore 

 have empty stomachs, for on 5th August 1896, while examining the 

 bodies of some bachelors which lay on the killing-ground and had been 

 killed during the course of a drive on the previous day, I opened seven 

 stomachs, of which one alone was empty, the remainder being more or 

 less full of a pink soup-like and nauseous-smelling liquid, in which 

 were many eyes and a few beaks of squid, also a few strips of white 

 flesh, either of fish or squid. One stomach contained a bit of 

 salmon, and there were pieces of what looked like seaweed in others ; 



