This commentary is by Peter DuBrul of Charlotte, a paddle guide and history teacher.
Zadock Thompson was Vermont’s Benjamin Franklin. At one time or another, he was a printer, a teacher, a writer, an Episcopal deacon, a farm worker, a historian, and a scientist. Thompson is remembered for identifying the whale found along the railroad in Charlotte, but was also the first to record what is arguably a more interesting Vermont sea creature: the harbor seal.
Although his records and the harbor seals were forgotten –—or maybe never known — by average Vermonters, harbor seals swam in Lake Champlain within historical times, and perhaps even within living memory.
In his “History of Vermont,” Thompson noted a seal near Burlington in 1810, describing how skaters came upon it lying on the ice, and how after a moment of surprise they removed their skates and used the blades to hack the seal to death.
In 1846, sleigh drivers crossing the lake from Plattsburgh spotted one, which they killed with their horse whips. Another was killed below the falls at Vergennes, and another shot in Weybridge. In the 1870s one was killed near Crown Point. In April 1882, a rower on an upstate New York lake saw a seal, and — you guessed it — he killed it.
Harbor seals in Lake Champlain surprised Thompson, partially, perhaps, because in his day Vermont was losing its large animals. Elk and caribou were long gone. Moose would soon follow, victims of deforestation, overhunting, and the demise of the beaver, which denied moose the ponds necessary for escaping heat and insects.
White-tailed deer were absent from virtually the entire state. Wolves were almost extinct. Ravens were routinely shot, and before long were sighted less often even than eagles, and would not recover in the East until the 21st century. The last panther — the word “panther” seems to have been used more than the word “catamount” — was killed in the snow in 1881.
For an interesting and depressing picture of the killing of the last few cougars in the region, read Clinton Hart Merriam; but in summary a cougar has no chance of escaping a determined human wearing snowshoes.
With the decline of subsistence agriculture and the passage of game laws, wildlife returned to Vermont. Likely that does not include harbor seals, although it is interesting that the 19th-century sightings were in winter and early spring, when a seal would be highly visible lying on ice. In a warmer Vermont, less ice cover would make it much more difficult to see one.
I know of no seal sightings in Lake Champlain during the 20th century, but my 1960 copy of National Geographic’s “Wild Animals of North America” gives the reader a vague and hopeful impression that harbor seals of the time might still have been making their way up to the lake, at least now and again. The National Geographic writers and earlier scientists assumed seals came up the Saint Lawrence.
The 20th century was not the best time to be a seal of any variety along Atlantic coast Canada and the United States. But after the 1970s, harbor seal populations rebounded, and seals are now regularly seen even in urban areas. They are seen not far, in fact, from Robbins Reef, a tiny island on the lower Hudson. 400 years after Dutch settlement, we still know the name of the island but not how it got its name: it wasn’t named after a person or a bird, but was named rob, Dutch for seal.
In recent years, harbor seals have swum far up Eastern rivers and have been spotted crossing considerable distances on land. Seals have swum up the Hudson to Albany and Troy. Although a canal now links Lake Champlain to the Hudson, the lake’s outlet was always downhill to the north, to the Richelieu River and falls, and from there down the Saint Lawrence to the sea. But for the last century the passage has been blocked by dams.
Snorkeling in Lake Champlain, I often see big bass and tropical-looking drum fish. Last summer, to my surprise, I saw a yard-long American eel swimming northward. I was surprised that she was swimming in daytime and was surprised that she was swimming there at all.
Eels famously hatch far out in the Sargasso Sea — a fact that as a boy I could absolutely not believe, finding eels in ponds surrounded by dry land. But probably because of the usual suspects — dams and overexploitation — eels are increasingly rare, especially in Vermont.
Yet years before, this eel had somehow managed to get all the way up the Saint Lawrence, up the Richelieu, over the rapids, around the dams, and into Lake Champlain. Now full-grown, she was swimming northward to reverse the journey down to the sea.
And if an eel can do it, maybe a harbor seal can too.
Sources:
History of Vermont in Three Parts, Zadock Thompson, 1842
The Mammals of the Adirondack Region, Clinton Hart Merriam, 1886
The Mammals of Vermont, George Kirk, Vermont Botanical and Bird Clubs Journal Bulletin, April 1916
The Mammals of Vermont, Frederick Osgood, Journal of Mammalogy, November 1938
Report of the State Geologist, George H. Perkins, 1910
Seals, Sea Lions, and Walruses, Jay Johnston, National Geographic Society, 1960