![]() ![]() To stand on the waterfront is to imagine the industry that passed through Brooklyn’s harbor. The Erie Basin Park incorporates memorabilia of the Civil War-era drydock and decommissioned shipyards (it was once the official end of the Erie Canal). Those cruises no longer take place, but he’s a whiz seal spotter, so I accompanied him on an epic adventure that began in the morning at the Erie Basin Park in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and ended with us chasing a rare bird on Staten Island at dusk. Gabriel Willow, an urban naturalist and environmental educator, designed and led Audubon-sponsored ecology cruises for nearly ten years on the now-defunct New York City Water Taxi. You can see them with your binoculars, or spotting scope, or, if you’re lucky, by boat. They avoid people and prefer to sun themselves on isolated islands like Swinburne off of Staten Island, and Middle Reef, off of Orchard Beach in the Bronx. They have spotted coats in various shades from white-ish grey to brownish-black. Adult seals can be between four and five feet long, sturdy, rotund, with lots of blubber to keep them warm, and they weigh between 180 and 250 pounds depending on whether they are male or female. They are swift and acrobatic in the sea (they can swim twenty miles per hour), but clumsy on the land (moving barely one mile per hour). Harbor seals are semi-aquatic, meaning they spend half their time in the water and half on the land. As one urban park ranger put it: “New York is like their Miami resort.” They vacation here from about October through April before heading north to breed. Mostly, they’re harbor seals that migrate south from arctic waters in Nova Scotia, Maine, and Cape Cod to the warmer waters surrounding our city. I love these words: pinniped (wing or feather-footed), spy-hopping (head out, looking around), banana-ing (lifting head and tail), porpoising (rhythmic pitching and heaving in the water), hobbling (dragging their bodies on the ground with front flippers), hauling-out (resting on land), bottling (resting vertically in the sea, nose pointing out), flipper-slapping (what it sounds like), and the words for a group of seals (herd, pod, harem, bob, colony, rookery).Īfter a century’s long absence, these past two decades, seals have begun to return in winter to New York City for a little rest and relaxation. I want to say their limpid eyes jolted me into my first seal crush, but it was the linguistics of their lives that initially captivated me. ![]() This is Sidewalk Naturalist, a monthly column by Lenora Todaro which sees New York City through its wildlife citizens, whose lives tell us something about the way we live in the fragile ecosystem that is the city today. ![]()
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