There is little chance you'll overlook an elephant seal on the beaches of Point Reyes National Seashore.

Elephant seals are not your small, cuddly marine mammals. They are behemoths. At the upper end of the scale these marine animals weigh as much as a pickup truck, and their ponderous movements and unusual proboscises will forever remove any thoughts of small cuddily sea creatures when you hear the word "seal."

"An adult male elephant seal, we call a bull, and a bull can be 5,000 pounds and about 15 feet long," said Sarah Codde, a marine ecologist at Point Reyes. "So really, quite impressive when you see them in real life."

For the next three months the seals will be quite visible at Point Reyes on the California coast. They don’t come ashore to simply laze about and soak up the sun when it’s shining. They're there to give birth and mate to produce another generation. Males are building their harems much like bull elk do, and that can sometimes lead to fights between these ponderous animals. The animals also show up at Channel Islands National Park off the coast, and at some state parks up and down the coast. It's an annual ritual, not unlike the swallows returning to Capistrano or Monarch butterflies to Muir Woods National Monument north of San Francisco.

Codde explained during this week's podcast on the National Parks Traveler that elephant seals are migratory, spending most of the year traveling thousands of miles in search of the meals that allow them to build up stores of blubber that provide both nutrition and insulation against the cold Pacific waters.

"Most of their lives is spent out at sea, but they come on shore twice a year," she said. "Once during the breeding season, and then a second time to molt; they shed their fur and their top layer of skin. So they come on shore to do that for about a month, but then the rest of the year they're just spent out at sea, constantly diving."

Destination Point Reyes

The California coastline is at one end of their migratory travels, the marine ecologist explained. 

"There are a handful of colonies along California and in Mexico," said Codde. "But they're traveling. Their foraging areas are north of us, kind of northwest. The females go into the open ocean just a few thousand miles northwest. The males, no matter where they are along the California coast, are traveling up towards the Aleutian Islands."

It's a long, solitary, trip for these marine mammals, which once upon a time were close to extinction. That problem arose when 19th century whalers realized the seals' blubber produced quite a bit of oil. Once on shore, the seals were easily killed.

"They're really, really easy to hunt. They're very predictable when they come on shore," said the marine ecologist. "Like I mentioned, they come on shore twice a year and they typically return to the same place every year. So they're very predictable in their movements, and they're not afraid of people. They don't really care about us, they don't run away from us. And so they're very easy to just go up to and, unfortunately, kill."

When it appeared the species was about to blink out of existence late in the 19th century, a small colony was found on Guadalupe Island in Mexico, said Codde.

"Once they were found, after a few years that island was then made into a reserve to protect the island and the elephant seals, and the Mexican government banned the hunting of elephant seals," she added. "And so from those really small protections the elephant seal population just started growing and expanding and then moved into U.S. territory. So then the U.S. government also banned the hunting of elephant seals. Now the entire elephant seal population today stems from that small population, which has some issues in itself, being from a little population, but the population now is doing great. There's probably more elephant seals now than there ever were before, really. It's an amazing, amazing conservation success story."

At Point Reyes the seals began showing up in the 1980s, and they've been returning each year ever since. Throughout the year 4,000 individuals might make an appearance at the national seashore, but during the winter months the numbers dips to around 2,500 as the juveniles don't make an appearance then, said Codde.

Elephant seals can show up at Point Reyes National Seashore throughout the year/NPS file

Evoluntionary Brilliance!

The species also is fascinating when it comes to evolutionary adaptations. Spending so much time in the open ocean, there are no beaches for the seals to come ashore to get any sleep.

"They sleep while they're diving," Codde said. "Most of their time is spent underwater. They only actually surface to breathe for a couple minutes, and then they're going to spend a half-hour, an hour underwater. They do these drift dives that allow them to kind of shut down part of their brain and sleep, but they're just little cat naps, like it's just a few minutes at a time."

When they're not sleeping, they're eating. While the bulls travel closer to the North American continental shelf, where it's thought that they're bulking up on squid and various deep sea fish, such as dog sharks. "They need to really eat a lot of the more kinds of nutritious fish that's really going to bulk up their weight," said Codde.

The cow seals head deeper into the ocean to avoid predators such as great white sharks. There they feed on squid and lantern fish. Both males and females can go to extraordinary depths to find a meal.

"They are one of the deepest diving marine mammals. They can go a little over a mile deep into the ocean," the ecologist said. "It's quite impressive that their body can withstand not breathing for an hour and withstand the cold and the pressure at depth."

The steady feeding comes in handy when the elephant seals reach Point Reyes, for neither the bulls nor the cows will eat while they're there, according to Codde.

"One of the things that surprises a lot of people is that elephant seals fast while they're on shore. That means they're not eating or drinking," she said. "A female during the breeding season will be on shore for about a month. She's not eating that entire time, and she's nursing a pup. And then the males are on shore even longer, they can be on shore for about three months. Again, they're not eating that entire time and they're fighting with each other."

The fighting looks more brutal than it usually is, according to the marine ecologist.

"There are kind of stages to the fighting. When a male is coming out of the water, he vocalizes to announce, 'Hey, I'm here. Who wants to fight me?'," said Codde. "And if the alpha male is already on the water or on the land, sometimes all he has to do is just open up an eye and look at the other male. And that other male might just hightail it right out of there and go back into the water. So that's kind of the first step. The male opens up, his eye looks at him.

"If that's not enough to scare the male, then the alpha male will sit up, kind of do some posturing. And if that's not enough, then he'll actually start to move towards the other male," she continued. "And usually by that time the challenger will get scared and leave. But every now and then it actually leads to a physical altercation where they're basically just kind of slamming their chests against each other, they're biting the backs of each other. The longest fight I saw was probably like a good 15-20 minutes and it actually went into the water where they continued to fight. ... Most fights may be a few minutes, but it's quite impressive to see. It is a bit bloody, so people have to be prepared for that." 

A visitor viewing a colony of the seals on shore at Point Reyes might find it hard to differentiate the barking and burping going on, but the seals recognize a bark when they hear it, according to Codde.

"The males, they basically can recognize if they've fought a male before, based off of his vocalization," she said. "So, kind of the first step when they're initiating a battle is to vocalize, to be like, 'Hey, I sound tougher than you.' And so sometimes they'll recognize [another male] and be like, 'Hey, I remember I fought you last year and I lost, so I'm turning around and heading away.' Or they'll be like, 'Oh, I fought you and I won, so I'm going to try to fight you again.'"

Helping with the distinctive vocalizations of individual bull seals are their large and distinctive noses, or probiscises. It was the enlarged nose that led to the seals' unusual name, as well. The nose "evolved because of their mating strategy. The males compete for the right to mate with females. So that big nose, basically, kind of helps deepen their vocalizations. They kind of use it as a resonating chamber when they make their vocalizations, which kind of help compete with the males before they go into an actual battle," Codde said. They also use their deep voices to attract harems, much like bull elk do on shore.

The females also recognize vocalizations, but largely to keep track of their offspring. Codde explained that as soon as a pup is born, the cow is vocalizing to her offspring. "The pup is vocalizing back at her, and she's really learning its sound," Codde said. "The pup takes a little bit longer to recognize its mom's voice, so it's really on the mom to be able to find her pup if they get separated."

Where To Spot Elephant Seals

There are several good locations at Point Reyes for watching elephant seals.

One place Codde recommended is Elephant Seal Overlook, which is at the Chimney Rock trailhead. "That's a really short little trail, and it leads to an overlook where you're above the colony looking down on them." she said. "We also have them at our historic lifeboat station. That's an area where there's a small group of elephant seals, but they're pretty close to the viewing area, so you're kind of on ground level with them, maybe 30 feet away from them."

Another area is at Drakes Beach. "That's really becoming the best place to see them," she said. "because they're really close to a parking lot, it's a very accessible viewing area. You can just park your car and look out your window and see some elephant seals."

Traveler footnote: Catch our entire conversation with Sarah Codde on National Parks Traveler podcast episode 305.