For hundreds, even thousands of years, New England has been providing its native people, early settlers and all succeeding generations with a beautiful, diverse and peaceful place to live.

It's also been a rich provider of the resources we need to live and thrive.

Now, one of those resources that's often overlooked unless we happen to live or work on the sea, is an amazing part of the North Atlantic known as the Gulf of Maine.

The Gulf reaches southward from Nova Scotia along the coast of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts all the way to Cape Cod and then extends southeastward about 60 miles to Georges Bank.

(Music Playing) For many more centuries than we've been gathering its fish and seafood riches.

The Gulf of Maine has been providing the North Atlantic with an amazing marine habitat teeming with all kinds of wildlife.

It's also been an especially rich feeding ground for marine mammals such as whales and porpoises and seals.

The most common of these species are the seals or pinnipeds, many of which live and grow in the Gulf of Maine all year round.

Welcome to windows to the wild.

I'm Willem Lange.

During the next half hour, we'll treat you to some of the beauty, diversity and character of New England's natural world.

Seals or pinnipeds, which means fin feet, were not so long ago hunted nearly to extinction along the coast of New England.

But in the last half century, they've made a pretty hearty comeback.

And today's adventure.

We'll visit some of these cute furry creatures up close, as well as some of the people who are working to ensure a healthy and growing seal population in the Gulf of Maine.

So why don't we have whoever is in bibs, in the bottom of the pool.

The rest of us will stay up top to receive the animals.

(Music Playing) This morning, we, drained the pool that the animals were in.

And what we did is we put in, a few volunteers and one of our staff members into the bottom of the pool with the animals.

And so we use those boards to direct them into the into the kennels.

And these are basically just your average dog carrier kennel that they are in and, loaded them up into those.

We got final weights on them before they left and loaded the rest of the vans for release.

So, last year we we did try, bringing an animal to the Isle of Shoals to release it.

So we're just going to bring her to the edge and open the door, see if she goes out on her own for.

Hey, do you want to do the honors?

Yes.

(Music Playing) Back off a little bit.

See what she wants to do.

We'll give her a little encouragement if we need to.

And the reason that we did that was that animal, had been released prior, and she kept coming back to, to the beach and was not and was not making it out on her own.

So we wanted to give her the idea of what it was like to be with other seals, other wild seals.

So we brought her out to the Isle of Shoals, because we know that there's, seals out there all the time that that, reside out there, so.

Well, this is way bigger than my pool.

The place that we're going to today is our normal release location.

We've had a lot of luck with it.

We try to look for some place that, is somewhat protected.

Somewhat a little bit out of the way, where the if the animals do decide to come back up on the beach, they aren't going to be bothered by a lot of people or, so that they can rest and sort of get their bearings before they head out into the ocean.

Jason, can you grab one of the boards from Sarah's?

Whoa.

You ready?

She's like I want this now.

(Sounds of wind, waves and people mingling) We have four seals here that are going to be released today.

And they all came to us as maternally dependent pups.

That means that they still needed their moms when they came to us.

But for some reason, they were separated from their moms or got sick and couldn't take care of themselves and needed to come to us so that they would survive.

When they came to us, they were really tiny.

For example, number 24, when she came in, she was only about 12 pounds.

And that's pretty much the size of a big cat.

These guys have been with us since about May, May to early June, and they're all healthy at this point and ready to be released today.

So just stay to the side.

Don't get in front of them.

Keep your distance.

Get as many pictures as you'd like.

And enjoy the release.

(Music Playing) No, no, they're not related.

There you go.

He says, I see water.

(Music Playing) So I we're going to do a seal census of the harbor and the gray seals around the island.

The associated ledges.

We're going to head towards mingo rock which is going to be on the far side.

And then we're going to do a clockwise census on the harbor and the gray seals.

Most of us, we expect to be on the protected side.

But one of the objectives of this particular excursion is to see what proportion of the seals are on this protected side compared to the exposed side.

So because it's so bumpy, I probably won't use the binoculars for the census.

Rather, I'll use, video tape and I'll scan the ledges, and then we'll just seal counts of heads in the water and hopefully be able to identify the harbors and grays.

These are the two main seals that we're going to look for.

Our harbor seals shown here at the top.

They've got this head that looks like a cocker spaniel.

There's clearly a concave shape to their between their eye and their nose.

And then the other common seal is the gray seals.

And they're really different.

The shape of the nose is more sloped.

Long slope, kind of like the horse's head.

And you can see it very clearly when they're in the water with the harbor and the grays.

Both are pretty dark gray when they're in the water, because their fur is all wet.

But the grays, we can also distinguish males from females.

The females tend to have dark spots on the light body, and the males are dark bodies with light spots.

So as expected, this whole area here, which gets pretty exposed.

We're not seeing any seals at all.

Now, if you're out trying to warm your body up, you don't really want a whole bunch of waves splashing on you.

It's more predictable that they would be on the protected side.

There was a lot of killing of harbor and gray seals, mostly because they were viewed as being competitors for the fishing industry.

And so prior to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which was passed in 1972, the seals were almost exterminated.

And since 1972, the Seals and and the Marine Mammal Protection.

Act for the seals and also all other whales, dolphins and porpoises are being protected.

Their numbers have just come back tremendously.

Harbor seals are much more abundant overall than gray seals, and numbers are a lot higher.

And we see that definitely here on duck Island.

We've been seeing about maybe 200, 250 here at the Harbor Seals throughout the season here, and maybe about up to 15 gray seals, sometimes as many as 70 we saw last year in the three censuses that were done along the Isle of Shoals, with 84 and 87 in 2001.

They never reported any gray seals.

And so, you know, these detailed account of tracking the gray seals and their population numbers in this area is really big because it's showing that the gray seals are definitely coming around and colonizing and populating these areas.

So that's a good sign overall.

And we've had evidence that they're pupping as well on this island.

So another important part of increasing the population size so that's good too.

Seals spend a lot of time in the water in order to forage.

They also do courtship in the water, but because they're mammals, they need to bring their core body temperature up and maintain, their energy.

So hauling out gives them a period of rest.

Generally what they do is they pull their bodies up on these ledges, rocks.

Sometimes in some areas it might even be sand, and they'll spend maybe 40% of their time hauled out, resting, increasing their body temperature.

If there's pups, which on duck island we found this year that they're definitely are, it gives the pups an opportunity to nurse as well.

So you can see how disruptions in that behavior, by virtue of having both vessel traffic, and causing them to what we call flush, which means that they leave their haul out outside, go back in the water could disrupt mother pup behaviors.

Could also have a physiological effect on the on the seals as well.

(Music Playing) Once they're ready to be weaned on to whole fish.

We see them haring and capelin.

And that's pretty readily available to us.

When they first start, we start them off slowly.

They'll get about a pound, a pound and a half a day, and they get gradually increased throughout their rehab.

Every day we increase them a little bit more.

The animals that were released this morning, we're eating about 9 pounds of fish a day.

We do a lot of changing of boots and making sure that we are, not cross contaminating between rooms because we want to be really sure that we're not bringing any diseases from one animal to another.

What we normally do is we toss them the fish, and then we'll go outside and watch through the one way mirror to see, how they're eating.

These guys don't seem that hungry right now.

(Music Playing) So we're in our multipurpose, surgery room at the Marine Animal Rehabilitation Center.

This room is used for surgeries on animals that that need it.

We also have the ability to do X-rays in here.

And we use it as a treatment room as well.

So this is an X-ray of the rear flippers of, of a gray seal.

And, this gray seal came to us with a large abscess or infection in the flipper.

That was eating away at the bone.

He was successfully treated for that condition.

The name pinnipeds, comes from the Latin word meaning winged foot or, feather footed.

These animals have a flipper, rear flipper that is webbed that they use to swim through the water with.

These are what are called phocid seals or true seals.

Sea lions can stand on their front flippers, and they can rotate their rear flippers underneath their bodies and walk on them true seals or phocids like this one have to inch long on their bellies like an inchworm.

So this is an X-ray of one of the harbor seal pups that we had here this summer.

He had a number of conditions which we attempted to treat, but unfortunately were unsuccessful.

He had a condition called hydrocephalus, which is basically fluid or accumulation on the brain, which really in a seal cannot be fixed.

In this.

Cat scan, you can see that he's got an inner ear infection.

These are the ears here.

And you can see the difference between the left and right ear.

The dark area here on the left ear is air.

And that's normal.

That's how it should look.

In this ear here you can see it's very cloudy looking.

And that is all fluid in that ear.

They generally don't recover from this problem because these are diving animals.

And what we don't know is if they can dive in the wild with an ear problem.

If the pressure from diving causes them more problems, these infections, also because of their anatomy, are very difficult to treat.

We were able to successfully treat the outer ear infection, but the animal still had a lot of infection in the inner ear.

How's it going?

Great.

You found anything interesting yet?

Yeah.

Do you want to, take a couple pictures?

Yes.

But I want to get to the ear first and foremost, the ear infections are problematic for a couple of reasons.

They would inhibit the animal's ability to clear its ears during dive, and would make it painful for them to descend to any significant depth under the water.

The other problem is, is that these water tight valves at the surface really prevent any discharge from leaving the animal, and so they tend to form abscesses and collections of pus in the middle ear, and then that eventually will extend into the bone surrounding the skull, the temporal lobe, causing an osteomyelitis, which is a much more severe infection in the middle ear infection.

Because the bones in the skull are very closely associated with the brain.

The earless seals do have ears, and they have a normal ear opening.

They just don't have the large external and the anatomical adaptations of the phocid ear or the harbor seal ear are the water tight flaps, that are controlled with some cartilage and some muscles surrounding the ear canal, which is present right here.

This would normally seal up in life, preventing any water from getting into the ear canal when they dive, and that makes perfect sense.

However, when the middle ear is infected, it also means that if the eardrum is is perforated, there's no exit source for the bacteria in the material to discharge from the ear.

And that creates a situation of higher anatomical risk for harbor seals.

We don't use the C word in this facility.

It's the C word being cute.

Although they are, of course, very adorable.

And, you know, of course, at several, after several years of, of dealing with them, you still do see that, that side of them.

But we try not to get attached to them because we do want them going back out into the wild.

We don't want them to be pets.

We don't want them to be treated as pets.

So we don't name them.

We give them numbers, and we try to maintain our distance from them as much as possible.

There's a lot of group behaviors that you can look at.

They you know, they look out for one another.

That's what's called vigilance behavior.

Their courtship is usually quite interesting, although we haven't seen that bear.

So you have a lot of underwater acoustics that they've used together for courtship.

And just in general, they're just a great study subject in the Gulf of Maine.

We have a wide variety of marine mammals, and marine mammals are the top predators there.

At the top of the food chain.

And so they tell us a lot about the health of the oceans.

What's going on in these marine mammals gives us an indication of what's going on in the ocean as a whole.

And in the Gulf of Maine as a whole, if you're lucky, and you happen to get here at just the right time, you can catch a glimpse of harbor seals sunning themselves on these rocks out here behind me in Rye, New Hampshire.

Thus the name Seal Rocks.

Or you can take a cruise out to the Isles of Shoals around.

Casco Bay.

But if you're swimming or hiking or just sightseeing on an island, please be respectful of our federally protected friends.

The National Marine Fisheries Service publishes a great guide to seal viewing that you can get free online.

Well, I hope you enjoyed our little adventure today.

I know I did.

I'm Willem Lange and I hope to see you again on windows to the wild.

(Music Playing)