Witness To History: Pier 39's sea lions

Last Friday, San Francisco’s Pier 39 had scheduled to celebreate the 20th anniversary of the sea lions arrival on the Pier’s K Dock. They had to cancel that celebration because there just aren’t that many sea lions hanging around these days.

Though it may not be a huge tourist draw at the moment, the dock has seen thousands of sea lions come and go in the past twenty years. Harbor Master Sheila Chandor sat down with KALW’s Max Jacobs and described the history of the sea lions at Pier 39 for this segment of Witness to History.

 

SHEILA CHANDOR: It was very famously just after the Loma Prieta Earthquake and we had one specific animal which was a large adult California sea lion that had some line wrapped around his neck and he started hauling out on K dock, when it was actually a dock that had boats on it. And we just thought it was kind of a funny thing to see but we didn't think much about it. And literally from that day, it took probably about five weeks and within that five week span we had accumulated five hundred.

CHANDOR: So we got this huge amount of animals and we didn't know what we were going to do with them. At first we thought we should just get rid of them because it was a safety issue for our boaters. I mean, we would have boaters literally getting off boats in the middle of the night and stepping on them. And so we conferred with the Marine Mammal Center and we ended up basically pulling out all those docks on K which had got pretty destroyed by them, and building those specialty floats built that you've seen out there.

Every summer, most sea lions headed south to mate, with usually less than a hundred staying behind. Once herring season started up again in late fall, though, back they came to laze around on the docks that had been built especially for them. This continued pretty regularly and predictably from the time of their first arrival.

It wasn’t until this last Fall that the Pier witnessed a sharp and quick decline in sea lion numbers, during what should have been their peak season. No one seems sure exactly why the sea lions have disappeared, but one theory is that their food supply has moved to colder waters. What’s stranger than the sea lions’ disappearance, though, is the fact that just before they left, their population at the Pier actually skyrocketed.

CHANDOR: That was actually a record number, it was over 1700. And what actually happened was because there was so many the K dock area was completely overextended. At Thanksgiving, we had at least still 900, but some of the herd had obviously started to move off. And then it seemed like it was only a matter of a week when it moved down to just half a dozen.

California sea lions have been spotted off the coast of Oregon in recent weeks, and many think these are the same Pier 39 animals. Could be: they are a different species from what normally swim those waters this time of year. One thing does seem certain, though, the local sea lion behavior is getting hard to predict. And while tourists may be hoping the sea lions return in time for their next vacation, Chandor says having a space where wild animals can come and go unrestricted, is a big part of what has drawn Bay Area residents in the first place.

CHANDOR: Wild animals in an urban setting, who are there by their own choice where you can actually keep apart from them, retain that wildness and not encroach on that, I think that's very much sort of a California way of thinking, I think that's very much a part of the psyche of the Bay Area.

On Pier 39, I'm Max Jacobs for Crosscurrents.