Flaco, Meet Neil the Seal

Manhattan is not the only place that can claim a wildlife mascot. Theirs of course is the famous Flaco, the orange-eyed Eurasian eagle-owl with the 6' wingspan who escaped from the Central Park zoo in February, and so far shows no interest in going back there. Whatever rodents Flaco can eat are just fine with him.

When I included my Australian X-pal @justjenking with my latest posting on Flaco she responded with amazement that Flaco has his own Wikipedia page. I didn't know that, but I'm not surprised. Flaco is the darling of New York social media and his sightings are newsworthy items.

Jen in Australia enthusiastically told me of the recent NYT story I hadn't yet caught up to of Neil the Seal, a Tasmanian elephant seal who has been showing up in public and private settings in Dunally, a beachfront community not far from the capital Hobart, on the Australian island state.

I'm somewhat confident that even those who can't qualify for Jeopardy might find Australia on a map, but I'm not so sure they could find Tasmania on a map. Aside from its natural beauty and always being associated with the Tasmanian Devil, a marsupial that looks fierce but is supposedly unaggressive, Tasmania is the birthplace of the movie actor Errol Flynn, a bit of a devil himself. "In like Flynn" is an expression attributed to his ease and proclivity of getting and romancing women into the bedroom.

Neil the Seal is not aggressive either, unless you count making himself so comfortable that a woman can't get past him to her car. He is very much the aquatic version of the elephant in the room.

Australians are accustomed to having wildlife get in their way. Snakes, frogs, turtles spiders kangaroos and wallabies have all collided with daily living. Jen has shared photos of snakes and frogs that have considered her home their home.

Through my PBS Masterpiece streaming subscription I've just taken in the first episode of The Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS),, an Australian outback medical corps that tends to the extremely isolated in Western  New South Wales, Australia.

With their twin engine airborne hospital/ambulance they reach those who are many, many miles away from anywhere and would likely die without medical attention.

The first episode revolves around a female surgeon who leaves the U.K. because of a breakup with her surgeon husband and who signs on with the RFMS.

On her arrival she finds herself in the customized hospital plane waiting to land on an Outback airstrip as soon was the ground people make a pass down the runway to chase the kangaroos off. Sully and the Miracle on the Hudson had birds in his engines, but colliding with kangaroos might not prove as fortuitous as Sully's heroics. 

The scene reminds me of reading about the lives in Unakakleet, a Bering Strait community in Alaska that runs its high school track meets on runways until incoming aircraft require them to pick up the hurdles.

The newly hired doctor establishes her chops by performing a craniotomy in an airplane hanger with a sanitized Black and Decker drill bit while getting video instructions from a Zoom feed with a neurologist 600 km. away.

Surgery is a success, and the welcoming party they throw for Dr. Eliza Harrod at the pub on Bingo Drag night finds the single mom headed back to the flight nurse's place for a quick shagging with the hunky  Pete. She's lonely after all, and doesn't know many people, except her teen-age son who's back at the apartment. This is only the first episode and she's already hopped in bed, so it's going to be interesting to see what she gets up to next. (I plan to keep streaming.)

But back to Neil the Seal, who can grow to 16' in length and weigh in at 7,500 pounds. His mother, probably off course, gave birth to him near the town, and since seals like to go back to where they were born, Dunally has a new member.

You have to admire the patience of the townspeople in not screaming for his oily ass to be dragged out to sea. It takes a nature-loving community not to see Neil propped up and gutted on cinder blocks like what would probably happen to him if he wound up on Manhattan's Avenue A, like some automobiles.

Now, Neil makes land near a fish and chip shop in Dunally where he "alternates between a boat ramp and the middle of the road." The nearby shopkeepers worry that if he sits in the road too long he will blend in with the color of the roadway and certainly get killed, but not before causing an accident. They have gotten the police to scare him back into the water with sirens, but he insists home is where his fins were born.

The NYT reporter, Livia Albeck-Ripka, tells us a Sydney-based ecologist, Dr. McMahon, feels it is likely that unless Neil finds some other seal company in the waters he is likely to keep returning. This might be good for tourism.

Flaco the owl of course is nowhere near the size of Neil and doesn't seem to impede humans. The fear is Neil will get too used to humans and will meet an unhappy ending at their hands.

As far as we know, there is no Wikipedia page for Neil the Seal, or a Go Fund Me Page to try and get him out of town to meet more seals.

If @justjenking gets in touch with you, you will know what's it's about.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com