Dear Friends,
I hope you are finding renewed hope in the new year. As we turn the page away from 2025, one thought burns so brightly in my mind and that is to Power On. We’re all in this together and as we become united, we will be empowered to right the wrongs.
This last photo of 2025, from the 31st, is of a Wild Turkey taken in the Wolf Moon a few days before it was completely full. Charlotte and I watched in wonderment as the turkeys took flight at twilight. It takes a good amount of energy for their ungainly bodies to become aloft and turkey flying comes with much noisy whooshing and vigorous wing flapping. They sleep in trees for protection from mammalian predators and even young poults learn to fly and roost on low branches, at the very tender age of only a week or two.
I have been meaning to share this video of Gray Seals singing. For about ten years or so I have been watching the growing population of seals at Brace Cove, which isn’t really very long in the grand scheme of things. When I first began to notice the congregation there, it seemed as though it was all Harbor Seals. More and more Gray Seals seem to be coming each year. One day in November I counted 14 Gray Seals hanging out together in the water, not on the rocks. Another day, there were 34 all told, both Harbor and Gray, in the water and on the rocks. There possibly may have been many more as they move around the cove and are often emerging from underwater.
The first clips are of a chorus of Gray Seal bull songsters; the last two clips happened several days later when two were behaving very affectionately towards one another. Notice how the more active the males became, the more anxious the small seal in the center of it all became before giving up its spot on the rock. Turn up the volume to hear the full chorus! Gray Seal mating season is happening now and the singing can be either amorous or territorial. Mating takes place underwater but I wonder if the clips where they are behaving affectionately is a form of courtship. Everything I have read states mating is violent but watching the seals playfully rub each other and dive together for fifteen plus minutes makes me think perhaps there is another side to Gray Seal breeding.
Power On Friends,
xxKim
