A Year with the Seals

For readers of Jennifer Ackerman and Ed Yong, environmental journalist Alix Morris recounts the year she spent following seals, investigating their fascinating behaviour, the effects of their extraordinary return from near extinction, and how we can try to bring nature back into balance.

It might be their large, strangely human eyes or their dog-like playfulness, but seals have long captured people's interest and affection, making them the perfect candidate for an environmental cause, as well as the subject of decades of study. Alix Morris spends a year with these magnetic creatures and brings them to life on the page, season by season, as she learns about their intelligence, their relationships with each other, their ecosystems, and the changing climate.

Along with the enigmatic seals themselves, Morris gets to know all of the competing interests in the intense debate about the newly recovered seal populations in our coastal waters, from local fisherman whose catch is often diminished by savvy seals, to tribes who once relied on seal-hunting for food, clothing, and medicine, to seal rescue workers and biologists, to surfers and swimmers now encountering seal-hunting sharks in coastal waters.

In a world where wildlife populations are disappearing at an alarming rate, A Year with the Seals is a rare look at what happens when conservation efforts actually work, and how human tampering with ecosystems continues to have unexpected consequences for a wide variety of species, humans included.