Posted on: Friday, January 18, 2002
Ailing elephant seal a rare Island visitor
By Curtis Lum
Advertiser Staff Writer
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| A wounded elephant seal who beached himself on the Big Island was brought by a Coast Guard aircraft to O'ahu for a checkup. Hawaiian Airlines will fly him to California today.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser |
Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, a young elephant seal took a left when he should have taken a right and ended up in Hawai'i.
Wednesday, he beached himself on the Big Island, and now he will be flown to California.
Elephant seals are usually found in waters off California and Alaska, rarely in Hawaiian waters. The last reported sighting was in the 1970s.
So when the young male elephant seal was spotted off of the Kona coast of the Big Island last Friday, he attracted a lot of attention.
National Marine Fisheries Service spokeswoman Margaret Dupree said the seal would come ashore, but wouldn't stick around long enough for officials to capture it.
On Wednesday, the seal showed up near the resort area of Ka'upulehu, and state Land and Natural Resources officials were able to determine that the seal was not well. Later, he ran aground.
At first, DLNR supervisor Charlie Nahale said his crew thought the mammal was a Hawaiian monk seal. But marine fisheries confirmed that the wayward animal was an elephant seal.
"When they're juvenile, they're all fuzzy," Nahale said. "They all look all the same."
The seal weighs about 250 pounds, Dupree said. Adult male elephant seals can weigh 10 times that amount.
Dupree said the seal had about a dozen silver-dollar-sized wounds, probably the result of shark attacks. But except for being a little tired and hungry, the seal was in good shape.
Dupree said the Coast Guard flew a C-130 airplane yesterday to Kona to bring the seal to O'ahu for quick checkup.
This afternoon, the seal will be put on a Hawaiian Airlines flight to San Francisco, from where it will be taken to The Mammal Marine Center in Sausalito, which specializes in rehabilitating distressed animals.
