Seal Tours are Back!
ARF! ARF! ARF!
Hi there everyone,
I’ve got some writing that I’m excited to send out to you in the next few days, but right now I want to let you know that Classic Harbor Line’s Seals and Seabirds boat tours are back this winter, and I’m going to be leading a ton of them! If you missed my writing about those last winter, you can check it out here (just make sure you’re aware that this is a year old, and all of the referenced calendar dates and tours have passed.) You can also read about the tours in Time Out: New York, and on Sabrina Imbler’s awesome newsletter Creatures NYC.
The tours depart from the north end of Chelsea Piers and run out to the wintry edges of the Atlantic Ocean just below the Verrazzano Narrows: a nearly 3-hour voyage with yours truly. The boat, Manhattan II, is beautiful, warm, and spacious. The food is delicious. The tickets come with a free beer, wine, or non-alcoholic drink, as well as a sandwich (if it’s before noon, there’s typically some breakfast fare instead, although you can still get a free drink if you want one, the norms about that being, in my opinion, different on boats than they are on shore.) In addition to grey seals and harbor seals, we see cool ducks, and gulls, and great cormorants, and loons! There was a paucity of northern gannets last winter, but I’m betting that it had to do with cyclical populations of baitfish, and that they’ll be back this year. The destination is a pair of desolate, under-explored quarantine islands in the Lower NYC Bay, and we never really know what’s going to turn up there! Years ago, Gabriel Willow saw a harp seal out there. Personally, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a snowy owl this year, which is a long shot but not completely unthinkable. In addition to birds and seals, you’ll get my affable (and I hope informative) narration on the natural and human history of New York Harbor, which is the kind of stuff I write about here.
I’m doing one of these nearly every Saturday and Sunday beginning in January and running through the middle of March. I know that’s still a little far out, but the holidays are around the corner and just like you, everyone you know already has way too many belongings. They don’t want more things! They might not know it yet, but what they want you to give them for the holidays is a trip on a seal boat. If you want to combine this with something they can unwrap and hold, Ryan Mandelbaum’s NYC field guide Wild NYC is a good bet. This seal stuffed animal from Wild Republic is also very cute and basically scientifically accurate.
The dates for the seal tours are:
You can also look at the entire calendar and click around that way by visiting this link! The Seals and Seabirds tours *not* listed above (Dec 15th, and the later tours in March) will be led by the inimitable Gabriel Willow when he’s back from his winter eco tours in South and Central America.
NYBG CLASS REMINDER:
I’m also teaching a class called Winter Wildlife Ecology in Cities with the New York Botanical Garden’s education program this winter.
The class has both a classroom and field-trip component. We’ll discuss migration, hibernation, morphological changes, and other ways that animals have adapted to survive winter before heading out to Pelham Bay Park to look at some of that stuff in person! I’ve been putting together some awesome readings. Working with NYBG is a lot of fun, and whether or not you take my class I recommend keeping an eye on the course offerings in the Urban Naturalist program throughout the year, because they have consistently great stuff running.
This will run as an online session on Thursday, 2/5, from 6pm-8pm, with an in-person field trip to Pelham Bay Park on Saturday, 2/7, from 10am-1pm
Okay, that’s all for now! I hope to see you out there this winter. More from me later in the week!
I have always wanted to do this! What is the seating like for just the non-window seats? I cannot tell from the photos where that would even be.