King Penguins, Gold Harbor, South Georgia
January 12, 2009
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Gold Harbor, South Georgia
I spent a fair amount of the morning looking over my shoulder for romping – and nipping – fur seals. Given that they were everywhere on the beach and in the shallows this morning it’s amazing to think they were nearly wiped to extinction by voracious sealers during the early 19th century. The population boom – there are estimated to be three million fur seals on South Georgia now, and growing – has to be one of the most remarkable wildlife regeneration stories of the last century.
Fur seals romping
This beach boasts adult males and females but the feistiest of the fur seals are the young pups, just several months old, aggressively chasing anything that walks. They don’t seem to be overly worried by the several-ton elephant seals they share the beach with … though they probably should be, since one mistimed flop as the big guys move up from the sea to their resting spot and the pups won’t make it to wiener.
Though its surrounding seas and wilderness are protected today, when South Georgia was discovered by Captain Cook, his reports quickly brought the British sealers over from South America in 1788, followed a few years later by those from the U.S. A period of intense slaughter followed. Secrecy of early sealing activities and new discoveries was paramount due to intense competition, thus the full extent of what happened here will never be known. In 1800, a Captain Fanning from New York recorded taking 57,000 fur seal skins, probably the largest haul from the island, by club or lance. Further south, Antarctic fur seals were hunted to virtual extinction and sealing thus became uneconomic. In 1825, James Weddell, a sealer whose name now graces the Weddell Sea, estimated 1,200,000 fur seal pelts had been taken.
It was a highly profitable enterprise. The skins were washed in salt water and salted before being packed into barrels for shipping to Europe, North America and China. The English took their pelts to the London fur market while the Americans supplied the Chinese market where the hair was removed and turned into felt for winter clothing and the skins tanned.
Fur seal in the tussock
Many of the bays around South Georgia still boast remnants of the sealing and whaling trades, which were discontinued only as recently as the 1960s, when British law forced all the protection of all breeding grounds of the fur seal in the south Atlantic, enabling them to mount an incredible recovery. Looking up and down this dark sand beach on a warm grey morning, swarming with life, it’s impossible to imagine the place without the little buggers. Though just as I was thinking how great it was to see them here cavorting, another of the little guys latched onto the back of my boot.
Tussock grass covers the hillside overlooking Gold Harbor
Elephant seals doing what they do best, lying about
Photos, Fiona Stewart
