Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

unpleasant and salutary incident illustrated the extraordinary tenacity of life in the
elephant seal (which applies to seals in general) and I resolved to use the .303 in
future. The prospects of killing large bulls without damaging the skull now seemed
rather remote but I couldn't contemplate repeating such a disaster. The following day
the sea froze for the winter and some months later – on 26 October – the mystery was
resolved (see later). (I found that the best weapon for killing even large bulls, was a
.22 rifle with high velocity bullets that penetrated the skull cleanly, leaving a small
clean hole that didn’t damage the skull for future research.)
At this time there were five elephants in Stygian Cove; the seal carcass had gone
from Drying Point Beach and also the other two seals. Paal Harbour was free of ice
and there were four elephants there. In another cove I watched an elephant trying to
climb out of the water onto the fast-ice. It forced its tail-flippers down and managed
to get a fore-flipper onto the ice, then propelling with the hind-flippers it tried to haul
out, but was unsuccessful. I was interested to establish when the last elephants left,
so on 7 July I made a count on snowshoes with Derek, up the Stone Chute and across
Elephant Flats, thence across the bay ice to Balin Point and around the coast to
Stygian Cove. We saw no seals. But next day there was one elephant seal in Paal
Harbour. By 11 July the bay ice was six inches thick. Ralph was on the ice at the
fishing hole and twice a Weddell seal came up to blow but when I got there it wasn't
to be seen. It was all very beautiful with Coronation as the backcloth. Five days later
we covered the routine seal count areas and saw nothing: no seals throughout the
area.
Next day, however, I saw an elephant seal blowing in the tide-crack around a
large bergy bit. It expired before submerging. Then it came to each of the sounding
holes as we left them, using the crown of its head and scraping with its back to enlarge
the holes. It followed us to several holes in the line of soundings, before moving off.
We watched it surface at one hole, but it saw us and sank down very quickly.
Elephant seals had never before been reported closely involved with sea ice and so
these observations were all very interesting and exciting. In fact August was the only
month in l948 when the elephants were completely absent from Signy Island.
I made detailed studies of the elephant seals in the 1948 breeding season, which were
to prove even more interesting. That year the fast ice remained intact around the
island until the night of 29/30 October and most of the pups were born on the ice
that year – the first time this had been recorded for the elephant seal. We saw the first
bull near North Point, Signy Island, on 3 September But it was not until two weeks
later that another appeared. On that day, and again two days later, a huge bull (the
‘Green’ bull, which I marked with green paint) was hauled out on the ice near
Gourlay Point and further north was another. The ice edge stretched north-east
towards Coronation Island. On 26 and 28 September the Green bull was present in
Stygian Cove but wasn't seen again until 6 October when it crossed the fast ice from
the east and lay near Balin Point in the evening. Another five elephant seals were also
seen heading north-west from the ice-edge.
On 6 October Derek and I followed the coast to around North Point. There was no
sign of the very large elephant seal we had seen earlier though his distinctive tracks
were everywhere. One bull was moving in over the sea ice and by that evening it was
behind Balin Point; another five elephants were heading north-west from the ice-
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