I had a great volunteer day on Tuesday and want to quickly share a few tidbits. We’re not allowed to share pictures of the animals we rescue, but we do have a Nestcam on our barn owls, who have we think seven chicks at the moment. Mom was very active that day, getting off the nest to stretch frequently, probably because it was hot and sunny. The link is below. If you get an accurate count from the fluffy, scrawny chick pile, let me know! https://video.nest.com/live/USA9haKLvR

We rescued our first harbor seal neonate for the year, probably born one or two days prior, umbi, as we call it, still attached. It’s an adorable speckled furball, about 10 kg in weight and fairly active, a good sign. I was able to observe while two others tube-fed it and cleaned the umbi. Small animals like this are kept indoors, and a fellow just reached into the enclosure, grabbed it, and plopped it on a table, not even wearing gloves (his choice). Of course he still had to restrain it during the procedures.

Early that day I had been in a pen with live animals for the first time. The pens are outdoor enclosures about fifteen feet square, and this one had three baby elephant seals (about 40 kg each) and three people inside at once, so it felt crowded to me! My responsibility way to keep one animal isolated while my teammates tubed a second one, and the third one lounged behind a temporary fence in the corner. It was a hot day, and animals in all the pens were lounging in the sun until we disturbed them.

I had a lot of time to observe my animal over the board I was holding, though I mostly tried to keep out of its sightline. This is more important with sea lions, but we try to keep all the animals from adapting to human presence, even maintaining silence while working with them or nearby when possible.

Elephant seals, which we call ellies, have large, dark, liquid eyes, wide flight noses, and long, sensitive whiskers. On this day I had more time to examine their flippers, because the animals being tubed were resisting both physically and vocally, so that took a while.

Skeletons of marine mammal flippers, from seals to whales, resemble hand and feet skeletons of people, so I was not surprised to see that both the pectoral fins and the pair of hind fins were divided into five sub-appendages. The pectoral fin divisions looked a lot like fingers, with long claws centered on each like fingernails, and also made of keratin, though claws are curved and nails are flat. The appendages wiggled separately as the animal dozed–dreaming?–and were employed just as we would in a vigorous back scratch.

The dual hind fins were also separated into fives, but unlike hands or feet, they were symmetrical along a centerline, with the outermost being significantly longer than the others and the middle one the shortest. Fun fact: Seals use their hind flippers to propel and their pectoral flippers to steer, while sea lions do the opposite.

An unfun fact I’ve noticed about myself: when I write about volunteering at TMMC, I regularly report weight in kg and distance in English units. I certainly am more comfortable estimating in English units, and usually I am estimating distances. The animal weights come from charts which are marked in kg, so I just go with that. I have been trying to get myself to think in metric for years with little success. I wonder what other, perhaps less-challenged outdated habits I harbor? Yipes.