130 SEAL LIFE ON THE PKIB1LOF ISLANDS. 



water, but tlieir flight is resisted by the bulls, and before impregnation 

 they rarely succeed in escaping. After this occurs the discipline of the 

 harem is relaxed and the females go and come at will. 



1 neither saw nor heard, in my twenty years' experience as superin- 

 tendent of the sealeries, of any destruction of pups by reason of stam- 

 pedes of seals. But I have occasionally witnessed the death of pups 

 from being trampled upon by the old bulls during their battles for 

 supremacy. This is, however, of rare occurrence. Even if stampedes 

 occurred, the light bodies of the females, averaging only 80 or 90 pounds, 

 would pass over a lot of pups without seriously injuring them. 



Later in the season, after the old bulls have been superseded on the 

 rookeries by the jounger ones, the pups are already able to avoid being 

 run over, and as a matter of lact the death of pups upon the rookeries 

 from any cause whatever prior to the advent of pelagic sealers in Bering 

 Sea was so rare as to occasion no comment. 



It was not customary to drive from any points near enough to the 

 breeding rookeries to cause stampedes, and even if this had been done 

 I do not think any injury to the rookeries would have been occasioned 

 by it. It might cause some of the cows to move away, but they would 

 soon return again. 



It is very difficult to determine the average number of females prop- 

 erly assignable to a single male, and difficult even to ascertain how 

 many there are in any given family, because the boundaries of the groups 

 are never well defined, and such as would be said by one observer to 

 belong to a certain bull would be declared by another to be in a different 

 harem. The surface of the ground mainly occupied as breeding rook- 

 eries is very irregular. Harems sometimes run together. Ledges, 

 bowlders, and lava rocks hinder the uniform mapping of the family 

 groups, and it is not difficult, therefore, to select certain spots and count 

 a number of female seals which appear to be unattached to any male. 

 On the other hand, there are often found full-grown males upon the rook- 

 eries at all seasons with no families, and a still larger number with from 

 one to five females each. Such variations have always occurred. 



With our present knowledge of seal life, it is impossible to judge with 

 any degree of accuracy how many females may safely be referred to a 

 single male. But, by analogy, it is a very much larger number than 

 has frequently been named as a fair average. 



Horse breeders regard a healthy stallion as capable of serving from 

 40 to 50 mares in a single season; cattle breeders apportion at least 40 

 cows to a bull, and sheep raisers regard from 30 to 40 ewes as not too 

 many for a single ram, and in the latter case, at least, the season of 

 service is no longer than that permitted to the male seal. I think it 

 would be safe to place an average of 40 or 50 seals to a harem as not 

 excessive. 



It is not unusual during the early years of the Alaska Commercial 

 Company's lease to find exceptionally large harems containing from 50 

 to 100 females each, but we saw no reason to doubt that they were fully 

 served by the male. 



The erroneous idea seems to have gained lodgment that during the 

 first decade of the lease a reserve of breeding seals was kept on certain 

 rookeries, and that toward the end of this decade it became necessary 

 to draw on these rookeries because killing 100,000 seals per annum had 

 been too much of a drain upon the herd. This has no foundation in 

 fact. In the early years of the lease the transportation facilities upon 

 the islands, both by land and water, were very limited, and, as the 

 Government agent in charge (Captain Bryant) did not object, we con- 



