Southern Elephant Seal (Mirounga leonina)

Subadult male, Kaikoura, 3 June 2015

Elephant Seals are a fairly regular vagrant to NZ coasts from the subantarctic, but they always seem to appear where-ever I am not! This time I got lucky and this young male arrived on the Kaikoura coast, a couple of hours north of my location. He was first seen on Friday, and today (Wednesday) I managed to get up there to try and find him.

Brilliant animal! So much more amazing in person than I would have imagined.

He looks adorable!

Did you see his wound? According to one of the news articles I read he had a bit of a gash on his back, but it didn't look too big (at least on him).

Some people get all the luck!
At least it wasn't a kouprey.

~ Thaumatibis

I don't know about that, Thaumatibis - although we would be incredibly surprised if a Kouprey turned up on the coast of New Zealand on several levels, and would of course be incredibly jealous of anyone who saw it, I don't think that anyone on here would actually prefer this to *not* happen

zooboy28 said:

He looks adorable!

Did you see his wound? According to one of the news articles I read he had a bit of a gash on his back, but it didn't look too big (at least on him).

Click to expand...

he was pretty adorable, with his fuzzy-wuzzy nose. He was about three metres long, so fairly hefty too - and yet still quite a bit smaller than a full-size adult male!

His wound wasn't bad. It is on his right flank, which unfortunately is the side I had to be taking most of the photos from, and basically just looks like a black clot of dirt (you can actually just see it on two of the other shots if you look for the black mark). There was a smaller puncture-sort of marking as well. The original reports were saying the main wound was caused by a spear-gun but later after the local DoC officers checked him out they said it was probably a fight-wound from another elephant seal.