AMONG THE SEALS

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 171, 7 April 1923, Page 8

AMONG THE SEALS

NEWS FROM CAMPBELL ISLANDS. By telegraph.—Press Association. Dunedin, April 6. Members of the Campbell Islands Syndicate who returned to Dunedin today, state that mon on the islands secured over 300 sealskins. It had been a close season for seals on all the islands coming under the jurisdiction of the New Zealand Government for a number of years now, but special permission was granted to the syndicate to take 400 skins.

The sealers at the islands worked under great difficulties and in many instances they had to be lowered down cliffs by ropes. The members of the svndicMe say that there are thousands of seals on various southern islands, and that there is no fear of the animals being exterminated. They hold that the New Zealand Government is taking up a wrong attitude in continuing the close season from year to year, and they assert that it is a well-known fact that auxiliary sailing ships come from America and take as many seals as they can without let or hindrance. The time at which seals came to the rookeries is June. July and August. Tlicy then swim away to the icefields. It is pointed out that the islands are under the control of the New Zealand Government and that it is a Utopian policy to protect the seals to enable outsiders to come and poach freely in the rookeries. One of the men who returned to-day by the Tutanekai stated that whales ■were also plentiful around Campbell’s and that on one occasion he had seen eleven right whales in one shoal. The svndicate. has a plant for trying out blubber, etc., but so far has not actively prosecuted the industry. Flounders are plentiful, and some of them are very large. One flounder was 2 feet 6 inches in length.