A Year With The Seals by Alix Morris: Forget parrots, seals are top talkers too

Visitors to the New England Aquarium in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s would be startled to hear a deep, raspy voice yelling at them to ‘get outta there!’, followed by a loud belly laugh.

When the staff received complaints, they would smile and say, ‘I see you’ve met Hoover.’

Hoover was a harbour seal, rescued in 1971 as an orphaned pup off the coast of Maine when he was no bigger than a watermelon. He loved going for car rides with his rescuer, George Swallow, and when asked his name would reply ‘Hoovah’ (he spoke with a strong New England accent).

Too tame to be released back into the wild, Hoover eventually got so big that he went to live in the aquarium, where he continued to expand his vocabulary and enjoyed teasing passers-by.

This eye-opening book shows that seals – dubbed ‘the clowns of the sea’ – are extraordinarily clever. In 2019, researchers at the University of St Andrews in Scotland taught a grey seal called Zola to sing the first few notes of the Star Wars theme music.

One of Hoover’s ‘grand pups’, Chucky, will greet visitors to the aquarium by saying ‘How are you?’ Seals, it seems, have the ability to create and repeat sounds, in the same way that small children do.

Seals are found on every continent. There are 18 species of ‘earless’ seals, which only have flat slits for an ear, and 14 types of ‘eared’ seals, such as sea lions. Two species, grey seals and harbour seals, are native to the UK.

Seals have long been the stuff of myths and legends, perhaps because their cries sound so like those of a human. Scholars have suggested that tales of sirens – the mermaid-like sea nymphs whose song, in Greek mythology, lured sailors to their death – were actually inspired by the sound of seals.

They may score very highly for cuteness, yet until quite recently many types of seals were being hunted almost to extinction.

In the UK, the number of grey seals had dropped to a mere 500 by the early 20th century, as seals were hunted for their skins and their blubber (used for lamp oil).

Fishermen killed them because they saw them as a threat to fish stocks. Since new laws were introduced to protect them, their numbers have reached 120,000, meaning we have 40 per cent of the world’s population of grey seals.

It’s the same in the United States. Seal populations crashed but after they were given protection in 1972, seal colonies recovered and numbers are booming.

This has led to friction with fishermen, who complain the seals are depleting fish stocks.

Seals are also being blamed for attracting sharks. When a surfer was killed by a great white shark off Cape Cod in Massachusetts in 2018, some locals wanted seals to be culled so the sharks wouldn’t come hunting for seals near their beaches.

Alix Morris, an American nature writer and a fully paid-up seal enthusiast, is a lively guide to the world of these charismatic animals. After kissing one in an aquarium, she reports that while a seal’s whiskers look silky, they are actually more like porcupine quills. A seal’s breath, not surprisingly, is pungently fishy.

Despite their protected status, Morris fears that there will be more human-seal conflict, but is heartened by their resilience. ‘There is something so exotic, so unknowable about them,’ she writes. ‘But seals will endure, if we let them.’