It would have been easy to have missed the gray seal pup trapped between the boulders.
But on March 18, a man strolling along the shore of Odiorne Point State Park in Massachusetts happened to notice her.
“He said as he stepped over one of the crevices, he thought he saw something move down in the rocks, which seemed strange,” Ashley Stokes, the director of marine mammal rescue at at Seacoast Science Center, told The Dodo. “So he went back and looked down in the rocks to see what it was.”
The man reported the seal’s stranding, and Stokes and her colleagues at Seacoast Science Center went to help. Stokes said she thinks the young seal got stuck between the rocks after some rough weather.
“In the couple days prior, we had astronomically high tides, combined with some storm surge,” Stokes said. “With both of those things combined, the water level covered the jetty, which very rarely happens. The young seal likely hauled out on the jetty to rest, and as the tide water receded, slipped down into the crevice. The tidal height then returned to normal, no longer reaching the top of the jetty, so she had no way of getting out.”
At first, the seal didn’t seem to know what to think of the rescue team. When they tried to pull her out, she wedged herself deeper into the hole and used her nails and teeth to fight off the rescuers’ hands. The crevice was also quite narrow, which made the rescue process even more challenging.
But the team didn’t give up. They worked for over 30 minutes to successfully get her out, capturing the whole process on video:
“We ended up being able to wiggle her hind flippers out of the deepest part of the crevice and then got a blanket underneath her body enough to shimmy her out of the hole,” Stokes said.
Once they had the seal pup, they took her to the Seacoast Science Center to attend to her medical needs. The seal was pretty dehydrated, which was their primary concern. They guessed she’d been trapped between the rocks for 24-48 hours.
They also estimated that she was between 1 and 2.5 months old, which is pretty young, but old enough to be independent from her mom. Incredibly, baby gray seals only stay with their moms for about 21-28 days.
Thankfully, the seal was in pretty good shape, even after her ordeal.
“Her health, despite the significant dehydration and slight soft tissue swelling in the hind flippers, was deemed to be good,” Stokes said. “That, combined with her spunky nature and her obvious unhappiness to be handled, let us know that she was a good candidate for release, rather than needing rehabilitation.”
After giving the seal fluid therapy, the team tagged her and released her back into the wild, where she belongs.
“After a brief rest after exiting the kennel at her release location, she energetically swam off,” Stokes said.
The young seal hasn’t been sighted again, which Stokes says is a good sign since that means she’s probably doing well.
Stokes credits the man who reported the stranded gray seal to the authorities. “If it wasn’t for him, this story likely could have ended much differently,” she said.
However, she said that in normal circumstances, it’s important for the general public to not come within 150 feet of marine mammals, all of whom are federally protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act.