A Year With the Seals

It might be their large, strangely human eyes or their dog-like playfulness, but seals have long captured people’s interest & affection, making them the perfect candidate for an environmental cause, as well as the subject of decades of study. Alix Morris spends a year with these magnetic creatures & brings them to life on the page, season by season, as she learns about their intelligence, their relationships with each other, their ecosystems, & the changing climate. Along with the enigmatic seals themselves, Morris gets to know all of the competing interests in the intense debate about the newly recovered seal populations in our coastal waters, from local fisherman whose catch is often diminished by savvy seals, to tribes who once relied on seal-hunting for food, clothing, & medicine, to seal rescue workers & biologists, to surfers & swimmers now encountering seal-hunting sharks in coastal waters.