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Esplanade dock gets fat, sassy visitor
By adamg on Tue, 04/12/2016 - 7:54am
Dr. Ed spotted a seal just lounging on a dock in the Charles River this morning, probably the same one DCR reported by the locks yesterday morning:
The Globe reports New England Aquarium experts think the seal is perfectly fine and just enjoying gorging on some plump Charles River fish snacks.
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Comments
Leave It Alone
There are a bunch of Mr. and Mrs. Fussies who think that seals just hanging out are in some kind of distress. Leave them alone, don't call the Aquarium, don't call 311 or 911. They are just seals being seals.
I hear from my sister in law down the beach that a week doesn't go by that someone thinks a seal is in distress because it has it tush up on the sand / pier / marsh.
Right now seals are gorging themselves on herring and other fish as they go back up river to spawn. It is an aqua themed Old Country Buffet for them and this one looks like it had just eaten like a stoned pelican.
Seals are protected by the Marine Mammal Act and it is a crime (Federal) to touch / harass them, although they are starting to turn into water based turkeys around here. The problem is that when you have turkeys in your neighborhood nothing happens except people from Brookline hide or people on the Pike do not know how to handle one in the median. When you have seals in your local swimming area, you get sharks, and you don't want to be the slow seal.
Give credit to the clean up of the waters around here. We have seals in the Charles and we have had humpbacks off of Castle Island. Nice job MWRA.
More like an Old Colony
More like an Old Colony Buffet amirite!!!!
I'm kind of curious how it
I'm kind of curious how it got past the dam. Did it go through the locks or did it crawl around it by land? I suppose it can probably find its way back out either way.
Went through the locks
... and now it is going through the lox. It probably followed the herring heading up the current when they opened them up.
This appears to be the second
This appears to be the second seal in the river in the past week or so ... last one swam through the locks, was spotted by the staff at the Museum of Science, and eventually guided back through the locks. This could be the same one back for more, though. (hey, it knows a good thing when it sees it.)
It doesn't really hurt them to be in freshwater, at least for short periods, but it might need some help finding its way back to the harbor.
Bike
lane...
Not being a wiseguy, but...
...how exactly DO you handle a turkey in the median strip? Don't you have to slow down to a crawl so you don't hit it if/when it marches into the road?
Hit The Turkey, If they Enter the Roadway.
You are devaluing your car / repair bills / higher insurance rates / time and bills for chiropractor visits from when you get hit from behind because you braked suddenly in a 65 MPH zone over a bird.
Brake for people, moose, deer, dogs, seals (it happens) things that can do real damage to you and your car.
Turkeys? Meh. Would you slow down for rats, pigeons, or squirrels?
No damage from a turkey
No damage from a turkey
Thanks John
for proving why you don't take advice from idiots on the internet. A turkey can cause significant damage, especially when you're driving over 65 and it flies into your windshield / front end.
said another idiot on the
said another idiot on the internet
Yeah, ok bro
At least I'm smart enough to know there's a difference between hitting a 20-30 pound turkey and a pigeon or squirrel.
ok
i would rather hit a 20 lb turkey than be rear ended by a 2500 lb car
which is what the other guy was saying
'bro'
We recommend unconditional
We recommend unconditional surrender.
Somebody throw him a beach
Somebody throw him a beach ball.
Poor guy's been in a funk since
Heidi Klum left him.
Living the dream!
Living the dream!
Adorable!
He's fine
He just got the itis after eating too many herring.
seals
Something really needs to be done about the seals they are getting out of control. And if you go anywhere around Chatham or the cape beaches and there are hundreds of thousands of them if not millions and the only Predator to them are great whites which have been inhabited our beaches more more frequent now. But seals can destroy an ecosystem of fish they eat thousands of pounds of fish yearly each.
Shark Tracker app
You can keep an eye on Cape Cod sharks etc. with the OCearch shark tracker website or app (which I learned about on a Chatham seal watch cruise). Indeed, more seals = sharks. You can also apparently get a nasty bacterial infection if you pet a seal, so maybe don't give them too many hugs.
http://www.ocearch.org/