1899] THE HABITS OF THE NORTHERN FUR SEAL 37 
all, snap at him with great severity, and so he 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 ; 
