This story aired in the March 6, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
Right now, tens of thousands of elephant seals have returned to beaches along the California coast. And while they're on land, a lot is taking place. Social structure is being figured out, along with pups being born and mates being chosen. And here in the Bay Area, we have access to watch some of these epic animals in action!
But not too long ago, northern elephant seals were nearly extinct, which makes their annual migration feel particularly remarkable.
Click the button above to listen!
Story:
If you head up to Drakes Beach in Point Reyes during the rainy months, you barely have to get out of your car to see an elephant seal colony. And if you’re lucky you may even hear them first.
It’s breeding season for these pinnipeds, and mothers and pups are calling to each other right in front of the visitor center. Barricades block beach access from the parking lot, but the human visitors are happy to watch from behind the wooden fence. Justine Fields uses a camera with a telephoto lens to get a better look at the seals, which are clustered in the sand like big, gray boulders that can’t quite lie still.
She says, “I'm very into birding and learning how to do wildlife photography, so trying to just see if I can get some sharp images. They're good subjects because they don't move very much, and I'm still struggling with that.”
Docents in red vests mingle with the park guests and offer information about the massive animals.
“These guys, the big males, can weigh 5000 pounds,” says volunteer John Longstreth.
He tells me it’s actually pretty stressful for these guys to lie on the beach.
“They come in in December, don't leave till April, and they don't eat or drink that whole time, so they lose about 1000 pounds or something during that time,” says Longstreth.
These seals in front of the visitor center are just a few of the thousands that come to the beaches of Point Reyes during the breeding season. But for a long time, there were no elephant seals here, or anywhere in California. In the 1800s, the blubber-coated animals were hunted heavily for their oil. According to marine ecologist Sarah Codde, things got so bad that scientists assumed hunters had driven northern elephant seals to extinction.
“But a small population was found on Guadalupe Island in Mexico … So the Mexican government protected Guadalupe Island and banned the hunting of elephant seals,” says Codde.
Thanks to those protections their population recovered. Before long, the seals began looking for breeding sites further north, so the U.S. passed a hunting ban of its own. The seals recolonized the Channel Islands in the thirties and Año Nuevo in the sixties.
“At Point Reyes, we had our first colony in 1980-81 … And so the colony has continued to increase every year since. Basically,” says Codde.
Counting the total number of seals that come to and are born at Point Reyes every year is Codde’s job now. She also tags weaned pups, so she and her colleagues can keep tabs on them. The seals swim thousands of miles out into the open ocean to hunt for food, but most of them return each year to the beach where they were born.
“We're using elephant seals as an indicator species for what is happening out in the farther offshore ocean,” says Codde.
I’ve come to Drakes Beach today to watch Codde and her team tag weaned pups for the first time this season.
We squeeze through one of the barricaded gates and walk in our rubber boots down onto the beach.
We pass by a male who gets up on his front flippers and makes a drumbeat-like vocalization.
Further along, Codde spots a weaned pup, lying out like a gray tube in the sand. It’s smaller than the adults but still heavier than most people. Codde squats down and picks up one of its rear flippers. In her other hand, she has a tagger that looks like a big, green hole puncher.
The surprise piercing wakes the pup, and he curls into a C and stares at Codde with the biggest, shiniest eyes. Codde calmly stands up and walks back to us.
“Mine was a male, and right round, and Z189,” says Codde.
After her team records the info about the pup and its new tag, Codde tells them, “Mine sneezed right when I was about to do it, and so the flipper came out of my hand because the body jerked as it sneezed.”
We walk down the beach, tagging pups and collecting data about tagged adults.
When Codde sees an adult, she makes some observations and says, “Left, flipper number is H593, and it’s a white tag. And yeah, left square, code 3, and it’s an A, female. And her reproductive status is NU for nursing.”
Codde and her colleagues are building a dataset so that researchers can answer questions like: How long are seals living? How many babies are they having? And how loyal are they to the beach where they were born?
After about an hour, it’s time to turn around. On our way back, we see an alpha male warn a few interlopers to stay away from his harem with a lengthy vocalization.
Tired from the effort, the alpha male quickly lies back down, and his would-be competitors do the same. It’s mid-afternoon, and these blubber-coated behemoths are prone to overheating.
“Elephant seals don’t have a lot of ways to cool off. They don’t have sweat glands. They can’t sweat,” says Codde.
And with temperatures rising, lying still might not even be enough to beat the heat anymore. A few years ago, Codde noticed that new mothers had started taking their pups for dips in the relatively calm waters of Drakes Bay.
“Normally, a female elephant seal is going to stay far away from the water's edge, because pups can't swim for the first few weeks of life,” says Codde.
At the same time, climate change is making it harder for mothers to practice water-safety precautions when they need to. More extreme weather events have been whipping up bigger waves.
“Those atmospheric rivers that we seem to be having more and more, those are really hard. That caused a lot of pup mortality, which was hard to see and experience,” says Codde.
2025 has been calmer and safer for pups, and there’s more of them. But Sarah’s also noticed that the number of adult females has stayed flat since 2022. Adults are strong swimmers, so rough waves wouldn’t really affect their survival. Perhaps the seals of Point Reyes have finally reached a stable population 40 years after their return, or maybe the quality or quantity of the food out in the open ocean has fallen?
“It's long term monitoring, so that we can see these ups and downs, and see what is normal change, and then see when changes are out of the normal." - Sarah Codde
“It's long term monitoring, so that we can see these ups and downs, and see what is normal change, and then see when changes are out of the normal,” says Codde.
It’s just tough to know what normal is or when it starts for an animal that recently pulled back from the brink of extinction. But Sarah and her colleagues plan to continue counting and tagging for as long as they can. And at some point, they hope their data will show when elephant seals made the switch from “conservation project in progress” to insightful indicators of environmental change.
Drakes Beach in Point Reyes is closed for elephant seal breeding season, but visitors can get a great view of the animals from the visitor center.
If you'd like to see Elephant Seals on a Bay Area beach, Año Nuevo State Park near Pescadero, CA offers guided walks daily, from 8am-6pm, through March 31st.
(National Park Service disclaimer: Elephant seal monitoring activities at Point Reyes National Seashore are authorized under the National Marine Fisheries Service Permit Number 27424.)
