While driving along a winding road to Holberg in northern Vancouver Island, Greg Clarke spotted a peculiar spectacle: a sea lion plopped down on the gravel terrain.
“It was by far the weirdest thing I have ever seen … a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Clarke, who told the National Post he’s seen elk, deer, bears and cougars along the remote logging roads but never a marine mammal.
Understandably so, as the sea lion was about seven kilometres from the ocean and appeared to have gotten lost, according to Paul Cottrell, marine mammal co-ordinator for Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO).
“It’s very odd and rare — quite a unique situation,” Cottrell said. “He looked like a dog chasing cars.”
The encounter happened around 2:30 p.m. Monday while Clarke was driving home from doing maintenance on a nearby radar station. Earlier that morning, Clarke explained how a road maintenance contractor had stopped him to warn him about a sea lion he’d seen along the road.
“I thought to myself, ‘What’s he been smoking?’” Clarke said, recalling the dazed, stumped look on the man’s face. “I kind of chuckled at him until he showed me a very foggy picture on his phone where you could make out a sea lion.”
Six hours later, Clarke laid eyes on the marine mammal himself and he knew the man wasn’t just speaking falsehoods. He managed to capture a video of the encounter, which shows the 600-pound sea lion hopping towards him in an aggressive posture.
“I tried to go around him, but of course he didn’t like that very much,” he said. “He charged my truck a couple of times.”
He charged my truck a couple of times
Then, just as the previous road maintenance contractor warned him about the sea lion, Clarke decided to take it upon himself to warn other drivers about his wildlife sighting as well.
“Of course, they looked at me about the same as I looked at the young fellow,” he laughed, describing the bewildered expressions on their faces.
Clarke reported the encounter to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who had already been previously alerted to the strange location of the animal.
Source: https://nationalpost.com/
