Back in May, National Marine Fisheries Enforcement Officer Jerod Cook responded to a call from Petersburg’s police department about a stranded baby seal at the Libby Straits, south of town.
“He was just hanging on to the beach there,” Cook said. “We never did see a mother for it.”
He moved the seal to a safer location, then came back to check on it the next day.
“It was obvious that something, a decision, needed to be made,” Cook said.
After several weeks of treatment at the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, that seal returned home on Oct. 23. Over a hundred people gathered at Sandy Beach to see the nearly five-month-old Bravo get released back into the wild.
Among the excited crowd was coach Matt Pawuk’s middle school basketball team. He admitted that they should have been at practice.
“I like to say it’s because they’re gonna get extra credit in their science class,” Pawuk said. “But mostly I’m doing it out of selfish reasons, because I really want to see this.”
Nearby, members of Petersburg’s outdoor child care program gathered along the water.
“We love watching the seals when they’re here,” Kinder Skog co-founder Katie Holmlund said. “So it’s really exciting to get to see one released back into the wild.”
In May, after rescuing the baby seal, Cook sent it on that morning’s jet to Seward.
“His mother hadn’t come to him, and so I checked with the sea life center. They said they’d take him,” Cook said.
Jane Belovarac is the wildlife response curator with the Alaska SeaLife Center. She said they estimated Bravo was about three days old when he was found.
She said there are a number of reasons why a baby could get separated from its mom, but they don’t know what happened with Bravo.
The Alaska SeaLife Center is the only licensed marine mammal rehabilitation center in the state, and they got straight to work getting Bravo ready to go home.
“When this guy first came to us, he was about 16 pounds,” Belovarac said. “He now weighs over 50 pounds, so he is at a really good weight to go back out into the wild and start hunting on his own.”
In addition to helping Bravo pack on the pounds, the center also had to prove that he could hunt on his own and that he would have more than a 50% chance of surviving in the wild.
“We definitely feel very confident that this guy is going to do well,” Belovarac said.
Among the gathering at Sandy Beach, Jonas Banta was waiting for the seal’s arrival. Banta had already gotten a sneak peek of Bravo because he flew in on the same jet. Banta came to Petersburg to go deer hunting, but when he heard about the seal’s release, he came to check it out.
He said flying on the same plane as a seal was “actually very exciting,” and that the smell of the seal was also pretty prominent.
“It was smelly,” he said. “It smelled just like herring.”
Bravo arrived in a kennel in the back of a pickup truck and was promptly swarmed by children, eager to see him. He was soon carried past the excited crowd and brought to the water.
The crowd quieted down as Belovarac told Bravo’s story from the shoreline.
“He hasn’t seen the ocean in a very long time, and he’s never seen this many people. So we don’t want to scare him,” she said, asking the gathering to give the seal space.
Cook opened the door to the kennel, and Bravo hopped out into the waves. He came back to the beach once before heading off into the water, where other bobbing seal heads were waiting.
Belovarac says if you see a marine mammal that you think needs help, you can call the 24-hour NOAA statewide hotline at (877) 925-7773, or the Alaska SeaLife Center 24-hour hotline at (888) 774-7325.