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

the webs. As Ralph walked away all the cows noticed and immediately reared up,
noisy. The female with the new pup moved three yards away and her pup followed,
yelping. All except two Dominicans took to the air and flew off. This cow settled
down again and lay on her side. When her pup was searching for the nipples she
occasionally contracted her stomach muscles convulsively, as if in pain, and roared.
Another cow arrived at Drying Point and I marked her with a large yellow 2 on
the left side. The yellow paint showed up well and we found it lasted well. We
weighed two pups – at 122 and 116 pounds respectively, using the spring balance
mounted on the tripod. At 6.30 pm thirteen cow and four bull elephant seals were
visible from Berntsen Point on the fast ice; seven cows and one bull were in a
compact group on the ice edge and the others were scattered.
Blizzards blew all next day, 12 October, and the yellow and green harems
showed no change. One pup sucked from its mother, lips parted – and a good deal of
snorting, coughing, dribbling and swallowing was going on. The cow rolled back
once with a bellow, because it was too eager biting with its only two teeth. Other cow
elephants were now heading into Starfish Bay and Mirounga Flats.
Later I went out east investigate the seals at the ice edge and found two harems,
which I marked red and blue respectively. The blue harem was nearest Paal Harbour
and comprised a bull, three cows and two pups. I paint-marked the cows and tagged
and measured the pups. A couple of days later a bull, cow and pup were the nucleus
of a small harem, which later formed in the bay northwest of Gourlay Point. While I
was there the bull attempted copulation with one of the cows. Biting her neck and
drawing himself alongside her, he placed one fore-flipper around her and grasped
her tightly with digits and claws. But the cow was unwilling and struggled until the
bull gave up. Another pup, when released, made straight for the bull, yapping away.
The bull reared up and roared and the pup stopped – looking rather scared. There
were two bachelor bulls lying on overlooking ice hummocks at 40 and 120 yards
from the harem. One of them reared up and roared when we approached it, which
stimulated the owner bull. He bounced over the ice at great speed, and the bachelor
bull rushed off looking backwards out of the corner of its bloodshot eye to see what
his attacker was doing.
The red harem now included a large bull, 12 cows and six pups. Some twenty
yards north-west a giant petrel was picking at a dead pup; evidently it was stillborn
or lived for only a very short time after birth. I marked the cows individually with
red paint, and gave the bull a red strip on the right-hand side near the hind-flipper;
the red showed up very well on all of them. The bull lay for a long time after we had
arrived, gazing at us with bloodshot eyes, before taking action, while I tagged three
pups. When he did move it was very silently with his two fore-flippers pressed close
to his sides, reminding me again of a very large balloon tyre bouncing down a slope.
He came ‘lolopping’ in this fashion over the ice before I had time to finish with the
fourth pup and lay with his head on that pup's back, disregarding its frantic barking
and sniffing at it. When he breathed the expiration through the proboscis produced a
musical note like a low-pitched tin whistle. Then he placed himself with a foreflipper
on either side of the pup which was trying to escape. The mother came over
and twice tried to pull the pup away, but each time the bull reared up and roared
and then snapped at the cow. This happened to me, when I was trying to tag another
pup.
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