Sea lion makes a surprise Christmas visit to Sunshine Coast home
Credit to Author: Derrick Penner| Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2019 04:29:14 +0000
Unexpected guests occasionally appear during the holidays, but one Sunshine Coast homeowner and relatives were really surprised by one visitor that showed up for Christmas and didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave.
A full-grown male California sea lion showed up Christmas Eve in the Oyster Bay area near Pender Harbour, but quite a distance from the sea, and took up temporary residence in a fresh water pond on their property.
“Then Christmas morning he was swimming around in this little pond,” said Massey Padgham, a content editor for Postmedia News who was an invited guest at the home “which isn’t even connected to the creek.”
That creek is Anderson Creek, which flows across the property — owned by a relative of Padgham’s — through a wetland and into Oyster Bay about a kilometre away.
“All day yesterday (Boxing Day) it was at the main house, sleeping at the front door, under the deck like a dog,” Padgham said. “Very doglike behaviour in a lot of ways.”
It is not unheard of for seals and sea lions to travel up rivers and streams, said Vancouver Aquarium veterinarian Martin Haulena, and they will sometimes cross spits of land to get from one body of water to another.
However, spending time in freshwater ponds and swamps is unusual.
Haulena, the head vet at the aquarium, said officials received a number of reports about the sea lion, both through the Department of Fisheries and the hotline for the Aquarium’s Marine Mammal Rescue Centre.
At first, the hope is an animal in such a situation will go back the way it came, Haulena said, but when it started hanging around a home, they decided to put a rescue team together to capture the sea lion and put it back into its proper habitat.
Haulena said it had moved on to another swampy marsh-like area down stream, but not in the right direction, so the vet tranquilized him and two DFO marine-mammal experts, along with the Aquarium’s team of five, hauled the beast out of the water for transfer to a mobile cage in the mammal rescue centre’s van.
The sea lion, which they nicknamed James Pond, is a healthy 250-kg adult male California sea lion, and fairly young at about seven to 10 years of age.
“It was weird seeing him in there,” Haulena said. “You’re used to seeing muskrats and beavers (in a swamp) and here’s this big old sea lion going through the swamp.”
They took James Pond to a boat launch in Joe Bay, known to locals as Irvine’s Landing, for release, where he immediately waddled back into the ocean.
James Pond was “the talk of the Sunshine Coast” during his visit, Padgham said, with locals stopping by for pictures, but Haulena hopes it was a successful relocation among the 150 or so rescues they are involved in.
“That’s not to say he doesn’t have a problem,” Haulena said, adding that if he’s reported to be acting oddly again they would recapture him for a more thorough examination at the rescue centre in Vancouver.
“But we’re hoping for the best for him for sure,” Haulena said.
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