A Year with the Seals: Unlocking the Secrets of the Sea's Most Charismatic and Controversial Creatures

Description:

Environmental journalist Alix Morris spent four life-changing seasons with these elusive, intelligent creatures, investigating their behaviour, the effects of their extraordinary return from the brink of extinction, and how we can try to bring nature back into balance.

It might be their large, strangely human eyes or their dog-like playfulness, but seals have long captured people’s interest and affection, making them the perfect candidate for an environmental cause, as well as the subject of decades of study. Alix Morris spends a year with these magnetic creatures and brings them to life on the page, season by season, as she learns about their intelligence, their relationships with each other, their ecosystems, and the changing climate.

Morris also gets to know all of the competing interests in the intense debate about the newly recovered seal populations in our coastal waters, from local fishermen whose catch is often diminished by savvy seals, to tribes who once relied on seal-hunting for food, clothing, and medicine, to seal rescue workers and biologists, to surfers and swimmers now encountering seal-hunting sharks in coastal waters. This book is a rare look at what happens when conservation efforts actually work, and how human tampering with ecosystems continues to have unexpected consequences. But it’s also a gripping adventure story of a journalist determined to understand the seals and our relationship with them for herself.