Huge Bags Of Meat In All Five Boroughs Now

The city is full of “bewhiskered” harbor seals:

The inhabitants of Hoffman and Swinburne Islands, man-made piles in Lower New York Bay off Staten Island, have tended to be there not because they particularly want to be, but because they have to.

In the 19th century, the islands were a holding area for new immigrants feared to be carrying diseases. Later, they housed soldiers with venereal disease, quarantined parrots and, until the 1940’s, merchant marines in training.

But yesterday the 20 plump bathers lazing on rocks in front of ruined hospital buildings and paddling the flat waters off Swinburne had come of their own free will, and they seemed to be having a fine time. And for the scientists and students on a nearby boat, this was a very good thing.

The bathers were harbor seals, bewhiskered 250-pound ambassadors from the icy north, and they appeared as oblivious to the traffic whizzing by on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge two miles away as the drivers above were to them.

A few seals were first noticed on the islands in 2001, after decades of absence from New York Harbor. But as the seal population along the Atlantic coast has continued to recover and their wintering range has extended southward, the seasonal seals of Swinburne have returned and flourished.

“Look at them,” marveled Paul L. Sieswerda, the curator of the New York Aquarium. “They’re like bags of meat. They’re huge.”

“Man-made piles,” “Huge bags of meat” . . . sounds like a names for a band . . .

Last year, 1,200 seals were spotted off Long Island and Connecticut alone. This year, for the first time, the count has included the waters off New York City. Donald E. Moore III, the director of the Prospect Park Zoo and another passenger on yesterday’s voyage, said he had spotted 26 seals off Orchard Beach in the Bronx last week.

Hopes were high for yesterday’s trip, which set out from Kingsborough Community College on a 46-foot former buoy tender that the college inherited from the Coast Guard. But the seals did not immediately run out to greet the visitors.

. . .

“See right at the point — halfway between the rock and the water?” Mr. Sieswerda asked as the boat rounded Hoffman Island. “That black thing? That looks like how a seal would look. But I’m pretty sure it’s a rock. It hasn’t moved.”

More large black objects appeared on the shore. A cormorant! A tire!

“We’re trying to take a snapshot of what’s out here,” Mr. Moore said, trying to make the best of the situation. “Even if we don’t see anything, that’s valuable info.”

Then a distant glint, and another, and another one, closer.

“I got one bottling up by the pilings,” Mr. Sieswerda said, referring to a seal’s action of thrusting its nose straight up in the air. A few seconds later: “I’ve got two bananas now.” Seals tense themselves into an upward-pointing banana shape when they are alarmed.

Soon Mr. Sieswerda had many bananas, as the seals took note of the boat and dived off the rocks.

But they did not disappear for long. Soon the waters all around the boat had sprouted curious, dog-snouted faces. (A swimming harbor seal looks a lot like a swimming Labrador retriever.)

. . .

For good measure, the party spotted three more seals on the way back to the college just off Sea Gate, the gated community at Brooklyn’s southwestern tip.

The students were elated. “I would never have expected that around Coney Island,” said Avi Foster-Andres, a 20-year-old student in Kingsborough’s maritime program and a Brooklyn native.

The scientists were elated too. “We’ve got seals in all five boroughs now,” Mr. Moore said. “That’s really cool.”