The Seal That Needs a Shovel
The Saimaa ringed seal has lived in one Finnish lake since the land rose and cut that lake off from the sea, and by the early 1980s there were fewer than two hundred left. It is recovering now under a fishing closure that costs local households real money, and in warm winters its pups are born in snowbanks that volunteers build by hand.
A Saimaa ringed seal is born at the end of February in a chamber it did not dig. Its mother finds a place where wind has packed snow hard against a shoreline rock, comes up through the ice from underneath, and hollows out a cavity inside the drift. It is dark in there, and insulated, and about the size of a car boot. The pup nurses for roughly six weeks in it. On open ice, in a Finnish February, it would not last the night.
There are close to five hundred of these seals and there is nowhere else on earth to look for them. Lake Saimaa was cut off from the Baltic somewhere around nine thousand years ago, when the land, still rebounding from the weight of an ice sheet that had just left, rose faster than the sea could follow. The seals inside it stayed inside it. They are a distinct subspecies now, darker than their Baltic relatives and more densely ringed, and in a bad winter a large share of their pups are born in drifts that people built with shovels.
A population that was legal to shoot
For most of the time humans and this animal have shared the lake, it was vermin. It took fish out of nets and off hooks in a region where that mattered, and the state paid a bounty for killing it well into the 1940s. Full protection came in 1955, by which point the population was already thin. By the early 1980s the counts had dropped below two hundred and the trend line pointed at zero within a couple of generations. Everything that has happened since is the working out of that emergency.
What kills them now
Not hunting. Gillnets. A pup in its first summer is curious, dives badly and drowns in a net it cannot reverse out of, and for decades this was the single largest recorded cause of death. The response began in the 1980s as voluntary agreements with shoreline landowners and has hardened into a government decree: across most of the water the seals use, gillnets come out from mid-April to the end of June, which is exactly the window when a pup is learning to feed itself. Certain gear types are banned all year. Compensation exists and is not generous.
Protecting a species is never an argument with the species. It is an argument with whoever is asked to stop doing something, and here that is several thousand people who have kept a net in this lake since long before anyone counted seals.
The winters that stopped snowing
Then the other threat arrived, and it is not answerable by decree. In the winters of 2014 and 2015 southern Finland got almost no snow. Drifts did not form on the shorelines, lairs could not be excavated, and pups were born exposed on bare ice where the cold, the eagles and passing snowmobiles all found them easily. Volunteers coordinated by WWF Finland and the state land agency Metsähallitus went out with shovels and heaped snow into artificial banks along shores where seals were known to breed. In the worst of those winters, the great majority of the pups counted afterwards had been born inside a bank somebody had built.
It works, which is the uncomfortable part. The technique is now standard practice in a poor winter, the pup count has kept climbing, and the recovery target set for the middle of this decade was reached ahead of schedule. It is also a holding action against a process decided nowhere near this lake, run on volunteer labour in February, and dependent on there being any snow left to move. Nobody involved describes it as a solution. They describe it as the thing that works while a better answer does not exist.
Seeing one, and the odds
The two places to try are Linnansaari and Kolovesi, both national parks, both reached from small harbours around Savonlinna and Rantasalmi. Kolovesi bans motorboats, which is why people paddle it and why it is the quieter bet. Seals haul out onto bare rock to moult in June and early July and that is the window; the rest of the year they are in the water and effectively invisible. Guided boat trips run from Oravi and are honest about the odds, which are not good.
The rules are simple and worth keeping. Stay well off a hauled-out animal — a couple of hundred metres, not a couple of dozen — because a disturbed seal goes back into the water and stops moulting. Keep away from shoreline snowbanks entirely between February and April, including the ones that look artificial, because they are. Park entry is free, the boat is not, and the reasonable expectation for a morning out there is a very good lake with no seal in it.