of its use are given by such writers as Lloyd,1 Cneiff,2 Carroll8 and Cartwright
(Labrador).
Seals used also to be taken in Scotland4 by the barbarous method of fixing
a number of strong iron hooks in the rock close to the water’s edge at one of the
favourite resting places. The animals suddenly frightened by the discharge of a
gun hurried pell-mell to the sea, and in their headlong descent to the water one
or more were often hooked. The Scots probably learned this from the Scandinavians,
for the practice is still in use on the Norwegian coast, and is described by
Lloyd.
The amount of mischief wrought by Seals on salmon is, without doubt, very
great. During the summer and autumn running of the fish, the main body have
often at low tide to pass through more or less narrow channels to enter the main
river, and if Seals are numerous, scarcely one fish in four enters the Tay, the
Tweed, the Beauly, and the Brora, without the marks of Seal claws and teeth.
This is particularly the case on the Tay and the Tweed during the August and
September movements. I once caught four salmon at Murthly, one day in
September, all of these were Seal-marked; one of them had a large piece bitten
clean out just above the tail, and I do not know how he had survived the injury.
From these injuries Mr. R. B. Marston suggests that the salmon contract the
fungus disease so prevalent in the Tay and Tweed, and says:6
‘ Only last month Sir Waldie Griffith, chairman of the Tweed Salmon Fishery
Commissioners, informed me that quite a third of the salmon captured by the
fishermen bore traces of injury from battles with the Seals.
‘ Diseased Salmon.— It is highly probable that this accounts for the very
high mortality from the salmon disease among Tweed salmon. Mr. J. Hume
Patterson’s most interesting experiments and discoveries in connection with the
salmon disease prove pretty clearly that it is not contracted when the skin of
the fish is in a healthy state. Mr. Patterson found that to inoculate healthy fish
with the bacillus salmonis pestis (which he discovered) he had to rub off some
of the scales of the fish. It is surely not unreasonable to suppose that of the
thousands of salmon which enter the Tweed and die of disease every year, a large
1 Game Birds and Wild Fowl o f Sweden and Norway, pp. 420-424.
3 Bericht vom Seekalberfange in Ostbothnien, 1757. 3 Seal and Herring Fisheries o f Newfoundland, p. 35.
4 I have met men in the north who said they had seen Seals taken in this manner, but whether they were merely
relating what they had heard from their fathers or what they had actually seen I cannot say. I have often asked crofters if
they knew any man who possessed one of these old Seal-hooks, but could never receive a satisfactory answer.
5 Daily Mail, December, 1903.
proportion may have contracted it through being wounded by Seals; though, of
course, a great many get injured in other ways also.’
Owing to their fondness for salmon and sea trout, Common Seals will ascend
rivers and lakes to great distances. In America the Common Seal passes up the
St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, and Mr. Allen says that it has been taken in
Lake Champlain. The same author also states that the species ascends the
Columbia River to a point two hundred miles from the sea, and almost to the source
of many of the small rivers of the Pacific coast. It also works far into the interior
of Newfoundland by the river and lake systems.1
In Scotland I have several times seen a Seal below Perth bridge, thirty miles
from the estuary of the Tay, and one was recently taken in the salmon nets at
Stanley; but though there are rumours of a Seal having been seen as far up the
river as Aberfeldy, I have doubts if one has ever passed the Linn o’ Campsie,
which is a rough place. But Seals will ascend rapid and rocky streams, as related
at length by Mr; J; Harvie-Brown,2 who gives numerous instances of their presence
in Loch Awe and Loch Sheil. The same author in ‘ A Fauna of Argyll and the
Inner Hebrides’ tells (p. 24) a remarkable story of a Seal which came and took
three ‘ cuddies ’ (coal-fish) in succession off the rod and line of a carpenter who was
fishing in Loch Sunart.8
The Common Seal is subject to a kind of murrain or plague, a disease that
attacks the throat and face, which Dr. Edmondston in speaking of it calls ‘ a fatal
Epizooty.’
Low, in his ‘ Fauna Orcadensis,’ written at the beginning of the last century,
says that about that time * they (the seals) drove ashore in scores,’ and the plague,
which apparently does not attack the Grey Seal, has occurred in Orkney and
Shetland twice since then.
Everywhere round the north and north-west coasts of Britain we find superstition
attaching to the Common and the Grey Seal, and this I deal with more
fully when writing of the larger animal. With regard to the smaller species, it
1 In the Annual R efort o f the Newfoundland Department o f Fisheries, 1903, occurs the following passage: 1 At one time
the greatest enemy of salmon in the rivers were the otters. They have been nearly killed off in all the important rivers, and
at present do little damage. At the present time what is known in Newfoundland as the Harbor Seal commits terrible
depredations on the fish. There are large numbers of these noxious beasts in the Lower Humber, Gander, and Exploits
Rivers, and also the interior lakes. They kill the fish at all times, both when they are ascending the rivers and returning.
Their special ravages, however, are on the spent salmon coming down in the spring. These breeding fish are often very
weak and emaciated, and they readily fall a prey to their destructive enemies.’
* The Scottish Naturalist, January 1891. ‘The Common Seal in fresh-water streams and lochs of Scotland.’
8 For a similar instance of the boldness of the Grey Seal see p. 283; see also Field, October 3, 1903.