It’s back to the ocean for a lost seal pup that was found in a parking garage last month.
Santos, as the pup was named, was released into the waters off of Point Reyes less than one month after firefighters rescued him from a parking garage in Redwood City’s busy downtown area on Nov. 24.
Officials suspect he waddled his way from Redwood Creek to the Marshall Street parking garage, which is only a block and a half away. But it also sits in the middle of county government buildings and the downtown entertainment district.
“It’s likely that with this pup now maybe a couple months away from mom, could have been following a food source into the bay,” said Giancarlo Rulli with the Marine Mammal Center, which helped Santos recuperate. “Likely this animal just took a wrong turn.”
In the three weeks that he was at the center, he wolfed down herring and bounced back quickly from a case of dehydration. Caretakers with the center released him and seven other pinnipeds back in the ocean Thursday at Chimney Rock, a remote part of the Point Reyes National Seashore that juts out enough to put the animals close to cold open waters.
-- PUPDATE (1/3): Northern fur seal Santos is home for the holidays! Check out this video of him waddling back to the ocean @PointReyesNPS today. You can help other pups in need return home for the holidays too at https://t.co/X6U6sauJKH. pic.twitter.com/ehd0sBeOff
— The Marine Mammal Center (@TMMC)
December 13, 2019 What is still a mystery is how Santos not only swam onto shore, but made his way into the San Francisco Bay at all.
“The thing with northern fur seals that is much different than say, a California sea lion, is that northern fur seals are a pelagic species meaning they spend a lot of time way off shore, way off the continental shelf,” says Rulli. “They’re not like a sea lion that’s kind of hugging the coastline. So it is unusual to see a northern fur seal come into the bay and then beyond that, strand in a really unusual kind of public location.”
Santos now has a tag on his flipper for tracking. Rulli says the pup’s doctors believe that he just needed a helping hand to find his way back into the open ocean.
The center is working to release not only Santos but the majority of its hospital patients as caretakers prepare for the flood of elephant seal pups that come ashore in need of help during the winter.
