Thursday, January 30: Live Birth – A Year in the Life of an Elephant Seal
Free lecture with B. Misty Wycoff
Thursday, January 30, 7:00 p.m.
St. Mark’s in-the-Valley Episcopal Church, Stacy Hall
2901 Nojoqui Avenue, Los Olivos
Note: This lecture precedes a field trip to Piedras Blancas to view the elephant seals. See February 1 entry, below.
Female northern elephant seal with her pup. Photo by Jerry Kirkhart (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)
Rough and tumble life of male northern elephant seals. Photo by Michael L. Baird (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)
Northern elephant seals gather from December through March in large breeding colonies on several Channel Islands in California and Baja California. They also spend the pupping and mating season at a handful of smaller mainland sites, including on the sandy beaches of Piedras Blancas on the central coast. At this location, visitors hear the seals well before they see them. Northern elephant seals were hunted to near extinction in the late 1800s, but they rebounded successfully after protections were put in place. Known as the largest seal in the northern hemisphere, the males can be up to 14-16 feet long and the females 9-12 feet long. The nose on the adult male, as well as its size, is the derivation of the common name. B. Misty Wycoff will present this talk that explores the life of a female elephant seal from birth through the first year.
Ms. Wycoff is the administrator of the Speaker Bureau for Friends of the Elephant Seal, a nonprofit organization. She has been a docent for the organization for five years at Piedras Blancas. She is a semi-retired psychologist, has lived on the Central Coast for the last 15 years, and is the author of High Rain: Love Letters to the Central Coast.
