Hunting

At the Ballard Locks, wondrous things. The locks allow boats coming in from Puget Sound to reach Lake Union and Lake Washington, in Seattle. They've also been outfitted with a fish ladder for salmon, and several other mechanisms to let fish through the dam. Fish congregate there in large numbers, some stymied by the barrier, others on their way up or down the fish ladder.

We visited today in the clear sunlight. A kingfisher sat just below us on a concrete block as we walked along the dam. Twice, she dipped swiftly to the water's surface and returned with a tiny silvery fish in her long solid beak. Smack! and smack! she whacked the fish against the concrete, turning it in her beak, and smartly striking it again. Then she arranged it so the head would go down first, and swallowed it.

She wasn't the only creature hunting among the rich pickings at the locks. A small crowd had gathered to point at the smooth dark head of a small seal, protruding from the water in the middle of the canal about 100 feet away. He'd sink beneath the water, and around where he'd gone down, the fish would begin leaping, here, there and again, silver sparks jumping from the foamy water to escape.

Then the most wonderful thing of all. Where we stood, on a concrete walkway along the water, we could look straight down into the greenish canal, where the sun lit a channel of visibility down under the ripples. There, schools of fish swam, their heads pointing upstream into the current. Each only two to five inches long, I'd guess. Suddenly, as we watched, the sinuous form of the seal rose up from the green depths just below us. Then, for fifteen minutes, he hunted, first slowly swimming, then abruptly zooming forward as he'd zero in on a fish, twisting and reversing and swimming upside-down near the surface.

He'd vanish for a time, reappearing at the surface in the center of the canal. But as we looked down, we'd see the neatly lineated schools of fish suddenly roil and become confused. We knew, then, that the seal was near. And moments later he'd reappear, as close as if we were standing behind the barrier at a zoo.

We watched him for a long time, waiting for the fish to scatter into a starry mass, then watching the smooth predator fatly trail through, until he'd suddenly go slim and swift as a porpoise. His big flippers trailed him like oversized bedroom slippers.

I'd never seen a seal so nearby, nor in mid-hunt. This coast roils with life.