WiLD Blog

Thanks to San Diego Councilperson Donna Frye and our friends at the Sierra Club especially Ellen Shively and John Hartley for continuing to lead the effort to have the City of San Diego protect harbor seals at Children’s Pool. Given the overall threats to marine mammals due to increasing changes in ocean chemistry (becoming more acidic), it is more important than ever to protect these seals. The behavior by anti-seal activists who devote their energy to harassing the seals is unprecedented. Serge

S.D. panel OKs more time for seals

Proposal extends closure of beach
By Bruce Lieberman
SAN DIEGO  UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

November 16, 2006

The harbor seals at Children’s Pool beach in La Jolla could receive an early Christmas present this year – an extra month of private beach access.

A proposal approved by a city committee yesterday would extend the period Children’s Pool is roped off to people from Dec. 15 through May 15. The beach is now closed from Jan. 1 through May 1.

The extra time will help protect pregnant seals and their unborn pups, and young seals still dependent on their mothers, city officials said. The pupping season for harbor seals typically runs Jan. 1 through May 1. Mother seals have sometimes abandoned their pups on a beach after they’ve been disturbed or harassed.

The San Diego City Council must approve the proposal, and the California Coastal Commission will likely review the plan.

Activists who want the beach preserved for the seals supported the proposal, but they said it will mean little if the city doesn’t enforce it. They have long complained that neither city lifeguards or federal officials enforce barriers at the small beach.

“As long as there is no enforcement of your own municipal code, this travesty will continue,” said Ellen Shively, conservation chair of the San Diego chapter of the Sierra Club and one of 12 speakers in support of the measure. “Let the seals have their distance.”

A city ordinance unrelated to the barrier states, “it is unlawful to kill, wound, disturb, or maltreat any bird or animal, whether wild or domesticated” unless permitted by the city.

A rope barrier was erected along the western section of the cove in 1999, but in September 2004, it was taken down when the City Council decided to give people and seals equal access.

In 2005, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that enforces the federal Marine Marine Mammal Protection Act, recommended to the city that it replace the rope barrier. City signs urging people not to harass the seals were not effective, and the seals needed to be further protected during pupping season, the agency said.

On April 19, the City Council voted to re-erect the barrier from Jan. 1 through May 1.

“Children’s Pool offers a unique experience,” said San Diego resident John Hartley. “Nowhere else can people get so close to harbor seals and . . . experience nature. It’s a treasure that we should protect.”

We invite you to visit San Diego and experience what is to live in a city that resembles an episode of The Twilight Zone. San Diego is a city that faces an $87.4 million budget deficit in 2007, and spends annually more than eight million dollars to promote tourism and more than 20 million dollars every three years to replenish sand in their beaches. It is also a city that is willing to promote a half-million-dollar project to dredge a 200-foot beach to get rid of federally protected harbor seals. In a city with miles and miles of beaches, this tiny beach is occupied by a colony of about 200 harbor seals. The site, considered by the New York Times as one of the best places to visit in San Diego, attracts more than a million tourists every year who come to enjoy the unique sight of harbor seals giving birth and nursing their young.

Unfortunately, some City Council members are more interested in making happy some time travelers visiting from the 1930s, who don’t realize that the year is 2006, than to do what is good for San Diego. How do I know these individuals have lived in the Twilight Zone for the last few decades? These individuals violate a federal law that has protected marine mammals since 1973; they scream that children do not have places to swim in a city with hundreds of swimming pools; they scream that minorities are not welcomed in a country where segregation laws were abolished in the 1960s; and they scream that sharks are going to eat your children in a city where the only (unconfirmed) shark attacked happened in 1957.

The San Diego City Council members have in their hands the opportunity to stop the madness by protecting year-round harbor seals in Casa Beach, withdrawing the Casa Beach dredging project, and stopping the support for those individuals living in the Twilight Zone.

E-mail San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders and the City Council members and ask them to place year-round the rope that protect the Casa Beach harbor seals, to withdraw the dredging project proposal, and to establish the San Diego Marine Mammal Sanctuary in Casa Beach. Saul