Seal Monitoring Update 2025

An important component of assessing and maintaining a restoration project is monitoring elements on and connected to that project. One of the elements we are monitoring for the Kus-kus-sum Project is pinniped behaviour in the Courtenay River. Pinnipeds are fin-footed mammals, which in our region includes harbour seals, Stellar sea lions and, sometimes, California sea lions.

In 2024, we conducted the second year of our pinniped monitoring program, with 24 volunteers completing 187 surveys between February and November. We would like to thank the volunteers for their time spent on this program – over 467 hours! We could not have captured this important data without them.

Each survey included seven monitoring stations along the Puntledge and Courtenay Rivers between the LaFarge Pullout along Comox Road and the Condensory Bridge. Surveys looked at types of seal and sea lion behaviour observed at each location, including hunting and successful catches.

The monitoring program is currently collecting data to establish a baseline of behaviour and hunting success so that we can assess  changes once the metal wall is removed along Kus-kus-sum. The Kus-kus-sum section of steel wall stretches along 440 meters (~13%) of the Courtenay River which is approximately 3.5 km in length.

Findings

Pinnipeds have been found to engage in a variety of behaviors during this program and we have created a word cloud to illustrate the frequency and variety of them; the bigger the word the more prominent the behaviour. As you can see, swimming, floating and milling were the most recorded behaviours last year.

The bulk of pinniped presence and activity was seen to occur in the late summer and into fall, when adult salmonids return to the river to spawn. In general, there is more activity closer to the mouth of the river than farther up, however, hunting behaviours were observed at all survey locations. Hunting success was not the same at all locations and was seen to diminish as pinnipeds made their way up the river – in other words, seals were still hunting, but didn’t catch as often the higher up the river they went. This suggests that the more naturalized riverbanks that occur upstream (without hard armouring like the vertical concrete or metal walls along Kus-kus-sum and Lewis Park) may promote the survival and passage of adult salmon.

The Kus-kus-sum site is observed from two monitoring stations: 5 – Seventeenth Street Bridge, looking downstream and 6 – Airpark Marina, looking upstream. One of those stations, Station 5, had consistently high hunting pressure from August through November and also was one of the locations with the most consistent successful catches observed. This suggests that seals may use this area preferentially to catch returning salmonids. More years of monitoring data will help strengthen our understanding of the way seals are using the river to hunt and how behaviours change once the steel wall at Kus-kus-sum is removed.

Get involved

We will be running the Pinniped Monitoring program again this year. Please sign up for a training session and/or attend our Volunteer Symposium to find out more. We are looking for volunteers who enjoy being outside, can survey on a regular basis and can input data on paper and online data forms. Volunteers do surveys in pairs and need to be able to transport themselves to all survery locations. A single survey takes on average 2.5 hours. We provide training and all data forms.

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