Elephant Seal Nursing Godthul Harbor, South Georgia Island

For the lifelong have-no-child-ers, the livealone-ers, the penultimate one-roomdwell-ers waiting for that Bell to Toll; for the married men with a Man Cave in the cellar who’ve never ever changed a diaper - even for them - the sound of this Sounder is as Family and Familiar as a -

Come on over and bring the kid, the young’un, your new baby! Boy! She’s got a set a lungs, gonna sing the whole La, La Traviata a regular concertina you just wanna squeeze her we’ve

The soft of features -

The small pink tongue that cups at the edges -

Yes. You know. You right off recognize the raspy waller of an unanswered caller who can and will –

– justlikethat –

Allllll day (until he gets his always, h u ngry, way).

Newborn Baby Elephant Seal raises a tireless commotion loud as the Soundings of the Southern Ocean. Baby’s Mamma? She just wants to sleep. Respite and relief don’t stand a chance against the Need That Will Not Keep. She gives in, and slides her wide webbed hand of a flipper off the teat, that her own may take of rich… warm… drink.

Now before us all the stages, hauled out along the shoreline the quickly passing ages, parents and their young, the newborn and the old they will become, the needful and the needed, the suckling and the satisfaction that justifies -

All this:

To our surprise –

- We recall - - We recognize -

(As the Flower Knows the Seed)

That Baby in the Babe we used to be.

Field Note:

Elephant seal milk is nourishing and highly caloric. It has to be. Elephant seal pups have a limited period in which to grow and to acquire that coat of insulating fat without which they will be unable to survive. Essentially they are hungry all the time. And act accordingly.

Nurse. Digest. Burp. Nurse.

A familiar pattern to anyone who’s had a newborn baby in the family. And the vocals that accompany this round-robin of behavior are loud and constant and for some ineffable reason require no translation. Science has looked at the apparent familiarity and discovered certain traits that make it so. The soft and rounded features of a human infant are mirrored in many young mammals. We know them all as the young of the species and it is not just puppies and primates. Baby birds are quite obviously baby birds.

What I find more interesting and harder to explain are the commonalities found in the vocalizations. When the lion is enraged, we know. When a baby elephant seal cries in hunger we connect with the wanting to be fed. When a blue jay screams in terror caught in the talons of a red-tailed hawk, that too is recognizable. Chillingly so. Why?

Our separation in evolutionary terms from elephant seals is tens of millions of years. It has been several hundreds of millions since we shared a common genetic ancestor with a blue jay. But consider, the Universe has been here almost fourteen billion years while life as a whole has been on earth less than one third of that time, animals with a face (meaning animals like us) only one twenty-seventh.

Seen against the time scale of creation, our Kind (meaning that fraction capable of looking you in the eye and which chooses to do so and all that this implies) is very close, and very small.

Mark Seth Lender’s fieldwork and travel are arranged exclusively through Destination: Wildlife TM .

If you would like to visit the places Mark has been, you can contact them at:

www.destinationwildlife.com