I met up with Marilyn today to observe Rabbit Island. Marilyn was there from 11:45 to 2:10, I had to leave after an hour. While I was there with Marilyn we only had Aukai RL12 and P04 who has a roto-tag 215. ( I will explain in a minute). They were on waterfront rocks between the 3BS and SRI and would occasionally disappear into the water. They later moved up a little further as the tide began to rise. P04 seems active swimming in the water hole while Mom rested. Aukai's N13 bleach and two tags visible.
At about 1:20 Marilyn saw a small seal haul out at LPB. She is pretty sure this is P01 RP24 by her size
Okay back to P04's roto-tag. When the NOAA team went out to Rabbit Island on Thursday not only did they tag weaner P01 with RP24. They also tagged P04 with a roto-tag that is not intrusive to the pup. P04 is confirmed to be a female and tag #215 is on her right rear flipper. The tag was applied while both mom and pup were sleeping and it cause minor disturbance. Mom and pup remained together in the same spot.
Another update to Thursday was the adult female that had been there but left was RF34 Pua, RP24's mom. They were unable to get a bleach on her but she will be due to molt soon.
Team R&B got to a westside location and saw a seal hauling in. The seal went right to sleep, they were able to ID RH76 Kala. She suddenly moved way up inland to the right as if she knew another seal was coming. They waited to see but they didn't see anything. Then they had to pickup junior sealette.
Then they found their fat boy Kaale RH32 doing four minute dives at the outfall. Even with little fish in the area at this time Kaale still managed to feed himself.
After only finding two seals on the west side they decided to make the right to the other side to visit with Leia RL42 and P03 Puka. Before they made it out to see the mom and pup they first met up with Benny on shore to the right. There was a young girl with her parents checking him out. Then benny headed out swimming towards the area where Mom and pup were hanging out. Leia went to the shore with P03 close by and good ole Benny turned around and left the area.
"Sometimes in life you want more happy times, so we went to Mokuleia for some joy with the seals". This is what Team R&B does, they find the happiness in the simple joys of life! And I am honored they share it with the rest of us. When they first arrived RL42 Leia and P03 Puka were swimming and hidden. But the real magic happened with they went up on shore.
At one point during the beginning of a feed, Mom was on her belly and the pup was really hungry so Puka started sucking on Mom's cookie cutter scar. Junior sealette thought this was very funny. Leia finally presented and Puka, and the kid had a full meal, then went back to sleep. Mom held the pup down with her fore flipper, you not leaving. Then Puka put his fore flipper on Mom as if to say, well you're not going anywhere either.
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