Together my shivering team quickly agreed on a plan. We created a train of four snowmobiles and began to head toward an intersecting flagged road that we knew led to McMurdo Station. We also agreed that if we did not locate one of the tattered red road flags within twenty minutes we would stop and set up survival tents until the snowstorm cleared. We would be cold, but at least not lost or dead.
Inching our way forward, the four of us headed due west, confident that we would eventually cross the flagged route back to the station. The biggest danger was in losing our bearings and encountering one of the larger cracks in the sea ice. Years before a colleague of ours had died in this area of McMurdo Sound when his track vehicle had become trapped in a crack and then fallen through the ice, dragging him to a dark, cold, watery grave nine hundred feet below us.
Fine snow began to creep into my pockets and between my gloves and parka sleeves. I could feel my left cheek stinging in the cold and knew instinctively that frostbite was not far off if I didn’t get the area covered quickly. A brief stop to regroup, look skyward, and check our bearings allowed me to clear my goggles and readjust my clothing. Then we all saw it: a red flag whipping on the end of a wind-bowed bamboo pole. When the team finally reached it, we saw another flag drifting in and out of view in the swirling snow. We slowly drove forward, and then saw another. And then another. Miraculously, we had navigated through the blinding snow to Highway 1, the ice trail to McMurdo Station. By hopping from flag to flag we crawled as a team back to the safety and warmth of the field station.
The next day the storm cleared, leaving a blistered triangle of frostbitten skin on my cheek as a lesson. With the clearing came a chilling stillness that forced the entire team to hole up at the station. The silence was eerier than the roaring wind. Soon expedition isolation, loneliness, and friction set in among the silent, inactive expedition members.
No planes with supplies or “freshies” (fresh fruits and vegetables) would arrive for another month. The same faces encountered at meals grew scraggier by the day. The same monotonous institutional brown foods were eaten. There was little to do but wait out the tail end of winter harshness to continue our scientific research.
• • •
E-MAIL BLESSEDLY PROVIDED our one escape to the outside world.
“How would you like a Hawaiian monk seal?” I mused one day, trying to raise a smile out of Beau Richter.
Beau barely looked up from the cup of coffee he was hovering over. Having worked as a dolphin trainer on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, and more recently in my marine mammal physiology lab at the university, Beau rarely showed up without a cup of Kona coffee and sporting flowered board shorts and flip-flops. Even on the expedition he wore Hawaiian gear beneath his insulated pants and parka. He is the only person I’ve ever known to wear aloha gear in the field on Ross Island, Antarctica. He had shaved off most of his beard and sandy brown hair for the expedition, leaving telltale suntan lines that quickly faded in the Antarctic winter darkness. He was the requisite young brawn on the expedition, and he grew testy with the slow pace.
Beau slowly grinned his first real grin in days. “Sure. Go for it,” he responded absently.
“Be careful what you ask for,” I warned. The Hawaiian monk seal (scientific name Monachus schauinslandi) was the most endangered marine mammal in U.S. waters. Whereas other marine mammals migrated across entire ocean basins, the watery territory of this seal consisted of a small, thin scar on maps of the Hawaiian island chain. It was because of this rarity and isolation that the species was so intriguing. I wanted to use my scientific talents to help. However, these characteristics also made the Hawaiian monk seal nearly impossible to study.
The e-mail on my computer screen had come from the National Marine Fisheries Service headquarters in Maryland. It was short and cryptic, a simple inquiry. “Would you be interested in temporarily caring for an orphaned Hawaiian monk seal pup at your lab?” Jennifer Skidmore, a fisheries management specialist with the Office of Protected Resources (OPR) at NMFS was exploring options. Trained as an ecologist who studied the effects of invasive species on marine habitats, Jennifer was now in charge of finding homes for sick, injured, or otherwise abandoned marine mammals. She was an animal’s last chance before euthanasia.
I was both surprised and suspicious. To say that marine mammal researchers and government officials in the NMFS Office of Protected Resources were often enemies would not be far from the truth. Over the years I had weathered numerous skirmishes with the OPR. Admittedly, both sides had the best interests of dolphins, whales, seals, and sea lions in mind. However, field biologists like me, risking our lives and working with marine mammals, often felt that Washington bureaucrats were out of touch with the reality of what was happening to the ocean’s animals. Conversely, NMFS officials recognized that researchers were mostly ignorant, often purposely so, of the laws governing marine mammal protection.
Both researchers and NMFS personnel believed in the conservation of the ocean’s largest animals; we just took very different approaches to accomplishing that mission.
Jennifer’s office issued the research permits that allowed scientists like me to touch marine mammals. Only permit holders could legally approach within five hundred feet of a wild cetacean or pinniped. No permit, no animal access, no research. Researchers often navigated through years of paper bureaucracy and public scrutiny in the quest of obtaining the letter granting permission to study and save marine mammals.
For fifteen years my permit applications to work with Hawaiian monk seals had been denied, and I’d grown cynical about the ability of humans to save any species, much less this critically endangered seal. I recognized that my permit denials had little to do with science and everything to do with politics. From the government side, one did not take chances with an endangered species, regardless of a scientist’s good intentions. There were only eleven hundred Hawaiian monk seals left in the wild. The risk of losing even one individual in such a tenuous population was too great. The safe course of action was no action, or at least hands-off science, with the hope that nature would eventually gain control.
But I had learned an important lesson after three decades of studying animals: humans had overwhelmed nature’s capacity to heal. One by one in my lifetime the large predatory mammals—the lions, bears, whales, tigers, and wolves that I loved—were facing extinction. Monk seals were on the top of the list. I could not bear standing passively by, hoping for a solution to materialize. So I continued to fight a paper battle for this isolated Hawaiian seal.
Now suddenly, out of the Antarctic blue, an e-mail challenged me to step up.
As I gazed out of the frosted window, there was nothing more intriguing for me than going tropical. In one short reply I would shed years of paperwork and three layers of insulated clothing.
I ignored the obvious logistical nightmare of trying to house a tropical Hawaiian seal in the middle of winter in Santa Cruz, California. The bigger problem was that I had no money to care for the animal. Yet I tapped “Y-E-S” on the chilly keyboard, with each letter representing five years of begging for permits.
The odds of an endangered monk seal coming to California were so low as to be laughable. I doubted that I would ever again hear another word about this orphaned seal pup.
The next morning Beau proved me wrong.
3.
First Steps
He’s KP2,” Beau announced at breakfast in the McMurdo Station galley.
“KP2?”
“His name. The monk seal is called KP2. It stands for Kauai Pup 2, the second Hawaiian monk seal pup born on Kauai in 2008, and he’s a regular celebrity!” Beau had gone into detective mode for most of the frozen night and had found that there was a lot more history to the abandoned seal pup than was relayed in Jennifer’s e-mail. Sixteen months had passed since the day of KP2’s rescue from his birth beach in Kauai. In that time, the se
al had created quite an uproar.
“He’s been written up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal AND he’s been on CBS News. He’s even got YouTube videos! There have been protests about him on Molokai and Oahu. This is not just a simple case of a rehabbed seal pup.” There was a note of caution in Beau’s voice.
I didn’t understand why one stranded seal pup had warranted so much attention, even if he was an endangered species. At home in California, hundreds of stranded sea lion, harbor seal, and elephant seal pups were taken into rehabilitation facilities each year. After fattening them up for a couple of months, the facilities scooted them out the door and back to sea with little fanfare. Something was very different about KP2.
Concerned that we were getting in over our heads, Beau had placed another transglobal phone call to Traci in Santa Cruz. Technically Traci was the program manager and training supervisor in my lab, while Beau worked for her as the head trainer. Their positions notwithstanding, they were confidants in all things animal and related as family members rather than just close friends.
Together these two marine mammal trainers were the engineers of science for the animals we worked with every day. I supplied the research ideas, and Beau and Traci translated the tasks into doable behaviors for seals, sea otters, and dolphins. They were a yin and yang animal training team that traveled the world with me. Traci and I shared a tomboy attitude and a childhood shaped by multiple siblings. Growing up in the mountains of Southern California with three sisters, Traci had a childhood that might have shaped her into the ultra feminine. Instead she loved to get dirty and play with power tools. Traci could maneuver a Bobcat forklift with ease and then carry a blue Vera Wang purse to lunch. Research training was her unique skill, her life’s work, and her first love.
With Beau I shared a parochial school education and the strict discipline of priests and nuns. While I grew up on the East Coast during the era of the Newark race riots in the sixties, he lived with the pervasive street tension of the eighties on the outskirts of the roughest section of Oakland, California. As a minority white boy in an integrated school, Beau quickly learned to appreciate diversity, a lesson that helped him to overcome the haole stigma when he moved to Hawaii. Beau carried those early experiences with him and was dedicated to teaching young children about sharing the planet—both among themselves and with animals.
Beau was passionate; Traci was practical and persistent. It was my good fortune to have such a team on a shared conservation mission. However, both trainers now expressed doubts about taking on a high-profile, orphaned monk seal pup.
I swallowed a spoonful of cold cereal and chided Beau, “Where’s your sense of adventure?” I lived by the words that guided M. C. Escher, the Dutch graphic artist whose etchings featured impossible explorations of infinity: Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.
With the chemical taste of powdered milk dissolving on my tongue (I longed for the luxury of real cow’s milk on this frozen continent), I thought, what could be more absurd than moving a wild Hawaiian seal born on a tropical island to a university campus in the redwood forests of Northern California? Then again, what if, during our work, we achieved the impossible? What if we were able to help pull an endangered species away from the edge of extinction?
We had to start somewhere.
• • •
AFTER BREAKFAST, Beau and I began piecing together the first year and a half of the young monk seal’s life from news articles, NMFS reports, and a few phone calls. KP2’s first seven months had been spent in the company of humans. Following his momentous flight to Oahu, the two-day-old pup was placed in the PIFSC Kewalo Research Facility near Honolulu. Repurposed saltwater pools that had once served as a premier research center for studying the biology of large oceanic tuna were his home. To prevent an unforeseen drowning, the pool was drained, leaving the tiny seal pup high and dry on a sterile floor shaded by a small tent.
Instead of lazing in the sun snuggled on soft sand next to his mother, KP2’s days were filled with human hands desperately trying to keep him alive. Drs. Gregg Levine, Bob Braun, and Frances Gulland formed an expert veterinary team that would have been the envy of the top dog at Westminster. Their primary cause for concern was the extreme young age of the pup; no one had ever tried to rehabilitate a two-day-old Hawaiian monk seal. Without the immunities provided by his mother’s milk, KP2 started life with a severe health handicap. He was a wild baby living in a world of adult human germs.
In pediatrician fashion, the veterinary team compared KP2’s size to other island pups. Stretching out a sewing tape measure, the seal’s length and girth were measured and recorded on a medical chart. The doctors placed the tiny pup in a plastic Rubbermaid tray mounted on a bathroom-sized scale for his first weigh-in and inserted needles beneath his skin to take blood samples and provide antibiotics.
KP2 endured all the probing and poking without complaint. Despite the intrusiveness of the procedures, it was in these helping hands that the young seal found the nurturing that all young mammals crave. I was impressed to find that more than seventy volunteers from all walks of Hawaiian and Californian life had lined up to help care for the orphaned seal pup with the big, gravelly voice. Their only qualification was simple, unwavering dedication.
The creation of a human family to nurture such a young monk seal was unprecedented. With an abusive mother, an absentee father, and no surviving siblings, KP2 had no immediate seal relatives. Under the best circumstances, there is little that can be construed as “family life” for any species of seal. There is no fatherly interaction. Male seals serve only one purpose: to impregnate females. After sex the prospective fathers disappear, never to be seen by their offspring born approximately a year later. On the maternal side, monk seal mothers are initially attentive and forgo food themselves as they protect and feed their new offspring. But this idyllic maternal period is short-lived. After six weeks, these same mothers abruptly turn off the milk bar and head to sea, turning their backs on youngsters they will never see again.
I’d worked with Weddell seals in Antarctica and harbor seals in California, and found both species to be as independent as cats. Hawaiian monk seals went even one step further in marine mammal aloofness, and tended to be the most solitary of marine seals. This introverted character is one of the reasons behind the name “monk”—that and their dome-headed, spiky-eyebrowed, bewhiskered appearance.
As a result of this behavioral ancestry, the company of seals was not what KP2 craved.
“Brrauuigh!” KP2 took little time to inform everyone around him that he was hungry. He had not had a drop to drink or eat since he was born, and his skin sagged on his tiny frame.
In answer to KP2’s cries, the seal’s veterinary team blended salmon oil, electrolytes, vitamins, and a zoo milk supplement called Multimix into a “salmon shake.” The team worked with a sense of urgency, knowing that early nutrition dictated the development of growing tissue in youngsters, particularly the sensitive wiring of the brain, nerves, and eyes. But the seal pup did not know how to eat. A baby bottle held to his lips was as meaningless as the black lava rocks he had suckled to no avail on his birthday.
The veterinarians decided to go for a more direct approach. It was not exactly the maternal response the rumbling pup expected. While one sat astride KP2 and held on to each side of the squirming pup’s neck, another snaked a two-foot length of rubber tubing down KP2’s esophagus and into his empty stomach. The pup tried to roll and shake the tube out with a growl, but the vets persisted. They attached a large plastic syringe filled with the salmon shake, and with a steady push pumped nutrients into the hungry seal. Slowly the little seal calmed down as his abdomen began to bulge with food. With his stomach full and the taste of salmon burps on his tongue, KP2 fell sound asleep.
Like any two-day-old mammal, KP2 needed to be fed around the clock, and his adoptive volunteers came to the
rescue. As the weeks passed, their efforts paid off as KP2 reached many of the proper monk seal milestones. By day twenty-six his first baby teeth (two razor-sharp incisors) had erupted and were cause for celebration. Ten days later he began to molt his black puppy lanugo fur and develop a sleek gray coat that was the uniform of a juvenile monk seal.
With his interminable attraction to humans, KP2 grew both in stature and favor among his caretakers. As he grew older, he followed people like a lost dog trying to con them into staying longer. He bounced around his pool in anticipation of their arrival and his next meal, sliding in a circle along the perimeter with his floppy fore flippers propelling him along. If the caretakers were ever late, he voiced his impatience with a throaty “brrrooaarr.”
Before the volunteers’ eyes, the pup quickly matured into an independent young seal, and talk of his release back into the wild began to filter among the members of his veterinary team. The thought of KP2 being able to join his fellow monk seals gliding effortlessly through the warm, blue island waters was so exciting for his adoptive family that they were almost afraid to discuss it out loud. They envisioned their little seal sneaking up on o‘opu, the prickly spotted blowfish, and chasing honu, the green sea turtle. Once free, KP2 would feel the song of koholã, the humpback whale, reverberate through his body as it had for Hawaiian monk seals for millions of years. All of this was possible except for one problem. KP2 had never entered the water and, unlike any seal his age, he did not know how to swim.
To solve this oversight in his schooling, KP2’s pool was immediately filled and swimming lessons began. It was something that his mother should have taught him in the shallow waters of Kauai within weeks of his birth. On his first foray into deep water, KP2 proved that nature knows best. His initial attempts at submerging had his adoptive Hawaiian family rolling with laughter. They threw fish into the water to encourage him to dive, but buoyancy always got the better of the round seal as he eventually rose belly- or tail-first back to the surface. In contrast to the first swim by skinny wild pups, KP2 had grown too fat on salmon shakes to submerge. The thrashing seal bobbed like a diver wearing a thick wetsuit without a weight belt. Swinging his hind flippers frantically from side to side, KP2 churned the water into a white froth. Clearly, this “child of the ocean” needed assistance.
The Odyssey of KP2 Page 3