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

see their every movement against the bottom of silver sand. After breakfast we
walked around the shore to the Southwest to collect teeth from the two jasper
carcasses seen the previous night, and also collected a few more sea lions and
an elephant seal for biological specimens.
We walked along the beach, beneath nests of shags placed on overhanging
brackets of tussock and ran the gauntlet of their droppings. Tracks led up into
the tussock and then, about twenty yards in from the beach, we came upon the
most amazing scene. A large hole, about fifteen yards long and ten yards wide,
was filled with noisome, black, oily mud. At first it looked empty, but as we
watched we heard an animal breathing and, looking closely in the direction of
the sound, we saw a bump on the surface of the mud. A well-aimed stone and
the black, glistening body of a large bull elephant seal jerked up out of the
mud, and it roared at us. The seal, when we disturbed it to encourage it to go
into a patch of sunlight for a photograph, stirred up carcasses and bones to the
surface by its struggles. (We later found that there were in this pool, several
dead seals and more in an adjacent pool). In the surrounding tussock there
were several other smaller pools and no doubt more that we didn’t see. Some
were in the first stage of formation - it appeared that they started as ordinary
wallows, depressions in the ground, then filled with rainwater and were
churned peaty and black by the seals' movements. The large pool was at least
seven feet deep I found, when I sounded it. I thought that the carcasses could
be accounted for by the fact that in a dry year the mud level would fall owing
to evaporation, so the banks become higher, and as the mud becomes thicker,
so the seal cannot climb out. It was obvious to us that the tussock was no place
to be on a dark night!
Johnny took some photos and after taking tea we decided to visit the North
end of the island and set out through dense tussac, intending to go straight up
to the crest of the island. It got thicker and thicker as we climbed; sometimes
we were walking, forcing our way between tussocks; sometimes jumping from
top to top. We came to the crest and saw, to our disappointment, that the
tussac stretched right across from shore to shore. We had had enough of
forcing our way through it, so turned southwards to the grassy part of the
island. Johnny took several photos of the ‘pot-holes’, we collected some
bullock bones and then returned to the hut.
We had a good night and were up early. We decided to visit the ‘Goldfish
Pond’ as we now called the elephant wallow, to determine how deep it was.
Sounding with a pole gave a depth of seven feet near the edge, so it was
probably deeper at the centre. We prodded one seal and he glared at us
through muddy bloodshot eyes. (I think of him when anyone says: "Here's
mud in your eyes."). We found another pool with at least two dead seals. It
was oppressively hot despite the wind and the sea was very calm, especially
inside the zone of kelp.
After lunch we followed an indistinct path up to the top of the island,
where we shot three geese for the pot. While on the cliffs above an inlet on the
East coast, two sei whales swam gracefully below us; it was perfectly still and
we heard the rasping noise of their spouting before we saw them. They swam
around in a large arc, their large bodies plainly to be seen in the clear water,
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