In this morning's New York Times.  I'm just sorry I can't attach the
cute picture that went with the ariticle.  Seals do come along here
occasionally-- we were all astonished a couple of years ago to see one
fishing in the Gowanus Canal. ;)

New York Greets a Visitor With Love (and Raw Fish)
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

Published: March 3, 2005

Diana dos Santos stamped and hooted and hollered toward the water off
Pier 25.

"Come on, baby! Look over here! Come on!"

More entreaties followed, each directed at the sausage-shaped aquatic
mammal lazing a few feet offshore on a floating dock covered in snow,
not far from Battery Park City, onto which it had climbed. Bribery - a
whole red snapper bought at Food Emporium and tossed gently onto the
platform - had failed. Now she tried love.
   
"Hi there! Hi cutie!"

Finally, the four-foot-long creature, a young harp seal, rolled on its
side, favoring Ms. dos Santos, who works at the River Project, a
nonprofit ecological research and educational organization located on
Pier 26, with a drowsy stare.

"There we go," she said, sighing contentedly.

"If this were summer, we'd have hundreds of people here looking. But
in the winter, right after a snowstorm, it's just the lucky few."

The seal, which was first spotted earlier this week, had a number of
visitors in addition to Ms. dos Santos on Tuesday afternoon. Some of
them were drawn by word of mouth; others ambled over from the nearby
bike path to see why people were standing in the cold on a slushy pier
during rush hour.

"It's amazing to see a seal out there," said Joan Isbister, who runs a
personnel consulting firm in Chelsea. "I've seen all sorts of
interesting birds down here, but never anything like this."

Jim Wetteroth, who runs the Downtown Boathouse, which uses the
platform during the warmer months to launch kayaks and sailboats,
agreed. "I've seen them further out on the water, but never on our
dock," he said. "They're not supposed to like to be around people."

One spectator, Jennifer Derovach, a dog walker, heard about the seal
from a friend at the Bronx Zoo, where she is a volunteer. So she
steered her three charges for the day - a husky, a golden retriever
and a Shiba Inu - toward the Hudson River to take a look. Her verdict?
"He's cute," she said. The dogs did not register any opinion.

Sometimes the seal writhed and played on the dock, presumably the
closest thing to an ice floe that downtown Manhattan has to offer.
Most of the time it slept.

A pair of harp seals was sighted last weekend in the North Cove
Marina, a few blocks south; it is not clear whether the one now
ensconced near Pier 25, near North Moore Street, was one of them.
Biologists said visits by such seals were not uncommon in the New York
area.

"Young harp and hooded seals are the most commonly reported stranded
or beached marine mammals these days," said Greg Early, a marine
mammal biologist who works with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. Although the animal's traditional habitat is the
Arctic, he said, "they have been showing up for the last 10 or 15
years further and further south - inhabited harbors, open beaches,
people's backyards, you name it."

A few years ago, he said, a harp seal made it all the way up the
Hudson River to Albany. "So on the scale of strange things, you've got
something in the middling range," he said.

Scientists are not yet sure why the seals - usually juveniles - began
coming south in greater numbers.

Kimberly Durham, who runs the rescue program at the Riverhead
Foundation, which handles marine mammal strandings in New York State,
said her group logged more than 100 calls about stranded seals, most
of them harp seals, this year.

So far this year, the foundation has assisted 46 seals, including a
number of harps, at its treatment center on Long Island - double the
number in the same period last year.

City park rangers paid a visit to the pier on Tuesday to make sure
that the seal was not in danger, and sent digital photos of it to Ms.
Durham, who said the animal appeared to be in good shape.

"It hasn't completed its molt yet," she explained. (Harp seals molt,
or replace their fur, once a year.) "Oftentimes they will not eat much
while they're molting. The animal that is out on Pier 26 appears a
little on the thin side, but not enough to be concerned."

The animals, which are not considered endangered, are protected in the
United States under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

"The idea is you're not allowed to kill, injure or harass these
animals," said Mr. Early. "Harass is on the vaguer end of the
spectrum, but that includes scaring it or chasing it off from where it
wants to be."

Theresa
Stinky Pictures: http://community.webshots.com/album/125591586JWEFwh
My Blog: http://www.humanitas.blogspot.com