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

for a specimen, so Ralph and Derek brought the dory around to Berntsen Point
and I, having collected weapons and skinning gear, joined them. It was very
cold in the dory, all armed to the teeth with .303 rifle and two .45 revolvers
between us as well as my skinning knives etc. However, it soon became very
obvious that the leopard was headed further than we dared go, so we turned
back.
On 20 April we found a young female Weddell near the barges on the shore, so I
went up for the .303 and shot it for a specimen - through the neck so as not to
damage the skull; then Derek fired another shot from the .45. The reflexes were
quite substantial and continued some time although the animal was dead. It was
rather a brutal job and I didn’t think I would ever get used to it, but it was
necessary and had to be done. I hated killing animals, and more so seals because
of their large eyes; they are so human in many ways and so tame and essentially
defenseless. I skinned it and collected ovaries, uterus and fallopian tube sections;
I also cut off the head for cleaning the skull. Its standard length was 5 ft 10 1 2 ins,
snout to tip of flipper 6 ft 9 ins. The stomach was empty save for many parasitic
nematodes (worms). I cut out the liver for our consumption. By the time I was
finished it was getting dark and I was very cold and rather bloody.
Early in June I again saw what appeared to be a dolphin at the edge of the bay
ice; it was moving leisurely across the bay, but had gone by the time I had
fetched the binoculars from the hut. Two days later an animal was porpoising
across the bay about five yards from the edge of the bay ice. Fortunately I had
time to get the binoculars and watch it; it was not a dolphin, but again a leopard
seal. After each stretch underwater it emerged in a slow curve very similar to a
dolphin, showing the whole of its back including the tail-flipper. These
surfacings were repeated at intervals of about ten yards. When the sea froze over
on 17 July I went down to the sea ice to inspect the holes in the ice. The large hole
cut for the plankton hauls had been kept open by a seal most of the night because
it was covered by only a thin layer of ice. The other smaller holes all had at least
3 inches of new ice blocking them and I didn’t see any seals.
Three days later, on my way down from Observation Bluff I saw a seal moving
over the ice just off Berntsen Point. At first sight it was an elephant, but it was
small and moving in a different way. I went down to investigate and found it
was a crabeater with a lovely, clean, silver-gold coat, flecked with brown and
four parallel scars which had been inflicted we thought by killer whales,
following general opinion at that time. (Much later I confirmed that leopard seals
inflicted these scars). Returning, Ralph next went out to see it, but it was moving
East fairly quickly and was just off Paal Harbour entrance when he caught up
with it. I decided to make collections for the Natural History Museum, as there
were apparently no data on specimens of that age or time of year; also we
needed a skin to make sealskins for our skis. We took the sledge along and I
made a sketch of it before killing it. It was a male probably in its second year, as
evidenced by its small size (75 inches nose-tail), the scars and small os penis and
testes. I followed the tracks and traced them as far back as Drying Point. We
returned with the spoils to base where Ralph and I sat outside and roughly
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