After the obligatory visit to Hearst Castle, we headed over to Piedras Blancas to check out the elephant seals. It's mating/calving season, apparently, so my friend Alison (or was it her dog Brennan?) suggested we check them out. They were just up the street. In case you're wondering why they're called elephant seals, it's because they're about the size of the average year old elephant and they have this proboscis-y flappy upper lip.
They are blobby, floppy, wobbly, jiggly, googly and blubbery. When we first walked up to the beach with all the seals (the elephant seal main drag, if you will)
we were taken aback by their enormous size, their numbers, and one of the mommies had literally just given birth and we got to watch seagulls descend upon and gobble up the afterbirth. Gag! I will never look at seagulls the same way again. Yes, yes, circle of life and all that shit, but really, we had just eaten lunch for heaven's sake.
Mostly they lie around. The males (about a 1 male to 15 female ratio, it seems) spend their time fighting each other, presumably for the females. They can get more aggressive than this, but this is what I got:
So they fight, one wins and the other goes off somewhere else looking like he had something to do anyway. Then the winner first takes a breather, then he figures he'll get his just desserts, and he'll wobble over to one of the females and try to mount her. She will turn around and bark at him, with the most obvious "Are you kidding me with this?!? I JUST GAVE BIRTH, for Pete's sake!" look on her face you can imagine. He will gallantly give up, and go on the next one of his conquests, who will turn on him yelling, "Seriously? Do you NOT SEE THE BABY? I have a headache anyway." He will try another time or two, after which he will just lie down and rest. It's not at all clear to me what the heck he fought for in the first place.
