UPDATE: We have a winner from the seal pup born on Friday December 18th. Thank you for sending in your snapshots! The Gray Seal moms landing on Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge have already begun giving birth to adorable pups, but we have yet to catch it live on cam.
The Gray Seal Pupping Cam is Back!
Life is bursting forth in the midst of the shortest and coldest days of the year! Northern Gray Seals are about to give birth to cute, fluffy white pups just yards away from where the puffins of Seal Island, Maine spent their summer. And now the Gray Seal Pupping Cam is live again to bring
Enter the Gray Seal Colony
Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge is a 65 acre sanctuary managed in collaboration with the Audubon Seabird Restoration Program (Project Puffin), which operates a summer field station here. The program has successfully restored Maine’s largest colonies of Atlantic Puffins and Common and Arctic Terns. It also has done a thing or two for gray seals.
Pinniped
Did You Know? Gray seals belong to a group of animals called pinnipeds. Pinniped literally means “wing-foot.” This photo from our Cam Operator on the Gray Seal Pupping Cam captured this close up. Gray seals are part of the Phocid family. These seals “are known as true or “earless” seals. These animals lack external ear flaps and are incapable
Acrobatics on Seal Island
Gray seals are part of the pinniped family, and their streamlined shape gives them not only speed but flexibility. Seals are more agile and flexible [than dolphins] and some otariids, such as the California sea lion, are capable of bending their necks backwards far enough to reach their hind-flippers, allowing them to make dorsal turns. Pinnipeds have
