Annika Schimmel  returned not so long ago from a wonderful “Southern Circle” Namibia and Botswana camping tour. She had so many stories to share with is, but this is her favorite:

This time we did not only experience the typical African wildlife such as lion, elephant or giraffe, but we also had a special encounter with the Cape fur seals of Cape Cross on the Namibian coast line...

 

 

 

The seals at Cape Cross count more than 250,000 individuals in peak season, which is around November and December, the time of the year when bulls are back to secure themselves a group of cows to mate with and when the cows have just given birth to their cubs.  

  Our tour visited the seals in the second week of November and we were lucky enough to witness a cow giving birth! The newborn cub entered the world in a totally black fur and only weighs between 4.5 and 7kg, which is tiny if you imagine their up to 360kg fathers and 75kg mothers around them. As soon as the cub was born, it started suckling and you could already see the tight bond between mother and child. We watched the two of them for quite a while until we needed to proceed to Swakopmund and we were all hoping that this newborn little seal would grow to be a healthy and strong adult seal.

But we must also keep in mind that this is nature we were witnessing and that one third of all cubs do not live up to adult stage. As mentioned, the cubs are tiny in comparison to their parents, and the total amount of seals is huge. This often leads to young ones being injured simply by the weight of grown up seals. The cow also only feeds her own cub, which means that if she goes out into the ocean to find food for herself, and she should for some reason not manage to come back or loses her cub even though they usually find each other through calling each other, the cub would starve. These injured, weak or dead cubs attract jackals and brown hyena which build part of the food chain and also help to insure the survival of the fittest as well as preventing the spread of diseases through their “cleaning” of Cape Cross.

      

If everything goes well for our cub, it will be fed by its mother for about one year and also start having small fish and crabs from the fifth month of age on. When the cub is seven months or older, it will be able to spend up to four days in the water without coming back to the shore. The seals are able to do that due to their fur which gets finer the closer it is to their skin, which protects them from getting wet as well as a layer of fat which serves as isolation and keeps them warm. When our cub reaches the age of one year, it will now feed on mainly fish and eat a daily amount of up to eight per cent of its bodyweight. So if all goes well for our little newborn, we might see it again one day, maybe having its own little cub which is going to fight its way through the harshness of especially its first year of life.