Waterbury Evening Democrat

WORLD'S FUR-SEALS
It Is Proposed to Stock Lake Superior with the Animals.
Where the Supply Is Now Located
Most of Them Found in Behring Sea-Peculiarities of the Great Herds.

The recent formation of a company to stock Lake Superior with fur-bearing seals sets one to inquire concerning the regular haunts of these valuable creatures, and concerning the outlook for their preservation or extinction. Some one has aptly said that the question of the Behring sea fisheries is a matter of natural history rather than international law. Neither England nor America is so blind to individual or general interests as to wish to evade or prevent laws making for the preservation of the seal; and neither of the nations should count as a victory the grant of right to indulge in undue slaughter of the "sea-bear."

At present but few fur seals dwell in the south. There are some in the South Shetlands, in various small islands in the vicinity of Cape Horn, and near the mouth of the La Plata, but the main supply of skins comes from the Commander and Pribilof islands of the north.

As it is thought these islands in the Behring and Okhotsk seas had never been visited by man previous to the discovery of Behring and Medni islands by Vitus Behring in 1741, and of St. George island in 1786, it is believed the seals up to the latter part of the eighteenth century had been unmolested by the human inter. that probably few seals were captured prior to 1790.

In the northern Pacific there are three distinct herds: the most important is the American or Pribilof herd, which lives on two islands of the Pribilof group, St. George and St. Paul; the Russian herd of the Komandorski or Commander islands: the third, also belonging to the Russians, inhabiting Robben island in the Okhotsk sea. These seals do not spend the long cold winter in the islands dominated their homes, but all of them travel south into warmer waters. The American herd leaves the Pribilofs in November and December, going into the open sea as far south as the latitude of San Francisco, but in the spring inevitably returning to the retreats peculiar to its members. The Russian herd in winter voyage to the waters along the Alaska Fur Company's Headquarters east coast of Japan, and the herd from the Okhotsk sea passes down the western coast of the inland sea of Japan.

A marked feature of the life of the seal. the herds do not intermingle, year after year each adult seal returns as nearly as possible not only to the island of the preceding season, but almost to the exact spot. A "wonderful automaton."

The Pribilof islands of St. George and St. Paul lie in the Behring sea about 200 miles northwest of Unalaska and about 45 miles apart. Here on a sloping hill or a broad rocky beach, the seals establish their "rookeries," or breeding grounds, where the animals crowd together so close the pups are often trampled to death by the fighting males. The largest breeding ground is on St. Paul, and from the summit of Hutchinson hill, up the sea-ward slope of which the grounds extend, one can see a greater collection of seals than at any other place in the world.

It is the "bachelors" (young males) that the land hunter is supposed to look for; and for half a century this has been the law of the islands. According to its original lease, the company in possession of the Pribilof islands was empowered to kill 100,000 bachelors a season. This seems a large number, but, authorities say it made for increase rather than decrease, lessening the number of fighters and therefore not decreasing the population as a whole.

The Aleutian Indians tell that the Pribilof herd reached its smallest size some 50 years ago, when many thousand seals lost their lives during an ice jam. There is no definite record of conditions during the Russian holding, but when the islands passed into America's possession in 1868, the herd was of fair size. The greatest prosperity was from 1872 to '82, the estimate placing the number of seals of all classes on the islands at 2,500,000. At present there is not a fifth that number, and the decrease is due largely to pelagic sealing--the killing of fur seals in the open sea with firearms, clubs or spears. The Russian herds have suffered from the same cause, and even to a greater extent; and down in the south the Antarctic rookeries have also fallen a prey to the greed of man.

CHRISTOPHER WEBSTER.