The Seal

I was at the Marine Sanctuary office on Friday morning, entering electronic documents into their database. A phone call came in reporting that there was a baby seal on the beach on the harbor side of Ediz Hook, with lots of people and dogs around it. L., the Sanctuary's Resource Protection Specialist, rounded up some of NOAA's 'please leave the seal alone' signs, and keys to a vehicle (he bicycles to work), and invited me to come along out to the Hook to create a zone of solitude around the baby seal, if we could find it. But when we arrived, it was already dead.
Baby Seal, Ediz Hook, September 14, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

It seemed to be very freshly dead, but flies had found it; and some people had apparently had time to make a memorial array beside it with kelp and stones.
... (Click for larger image.)

Though on the whole dead critters are left where they lie, we were not in the Sanctuary, but rather in a very heavily trafficked part of Port Angeles's outdoors. L. moved the little seal to the outer side of the Hook, and left it next to the Strait.