1897-9^- TRANSACTIONS. 6^ 



The rur Seal of the North Pacific. 



J. M. Macoun. 

 AssistaiU Naiitralist to the Geol. Survey of Canada. 



\Read March ^th^ i8g8. 



Tlie principal resorts of the Fur-seals of the North Paci- 

 fic [Callorhinus ursifuis) are the Commander Islands near the 

 Kamchatkan Coast and the Pribylov Islands in L^at. 56° on 

 the eastern side of Behring Sea. They were at one time 

 found in large numbers on some of the more northern of the 

 Kurile Islands and on several small islands between Kam- 

 chatka and the Asiatic mainland, but being unprotected have 

 been on these islands almost exterminated. The seals fre- 

 quenting the Commander Islands differ in no essential respect 

 from those found on the Pribylov Islands. They have the 

 same habits, eat the same food and meet the same fate as the 

 Alaskan seal so that in order to restrict my paper to reason- 

 able limits I shall speak only of the latter animals. 



Though the Pribylov Islands were not discovered until 

 1786, Russian explorers and traders had for nearly fifty years 

 been searching for the breeding places of the fur-seal that at 

 certain seasons were very abimdant in the passes of the Aleu- 

 tian Islands and along the Alaskan coast. When Pribylov 

 landed on St. George Island, one of the group which bears his 

 name, he found no trace of the island ever having been inhab- 

 ited by man and it is due principally to this fact that they 

 were the chosen haunt of the fur-seals. Here for thousands 

 of years they had been unmolested, and if in earlier times they 

 bred on the Aleutian Islands further south they had long 

 before been exterminated by the inhabitants of these islands 

 who passed freely from one island to another in their skin 

 canoes and boats. 



