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Tag Archives: endangered species
Elephant seals: It’s baby-making time
Last January, I visited Año Nuevo State Park for a ranger-guided nature walk of the elephant seal rookery. Thousands of elephant seals were sprawled along the beaches of the park. The largest males frantically attempted to guard their massive harems, while outcast males, who had lost the earlier territory battles, repeatedly tried to sneak in from the water’s edges.
Just as the ranger explained that male elephant seals can grow to the size of a Suburban, he guided our group across a path that looked like it had been carved by the dragging of a very large, heavy sack. Just 20 feet away lay a basking, multi-ton male.
Brown pelicans and the oil spill
As of November 2009, Louisiana’s state bird, the brown pelican, was not an endangered species. The pelican population had dropped to a low of 10,000 birds in 1970, mostly due to the use of pesticides like DDT that weakened the eggshells so that they couldn’t support the embryos to maturity. But when the numbers rose to an estimated 650,000 birds last year, they were taken off the endangered species list. This was a conservation success story of the type that we rarely hear.
Now, in the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill, the web is flooded with pictures of oil-logged brown pelicans, and conservationists fear that all their hard work will be wiped away by this one catastrophic event.