During a conversation the other week, Bob Cook pointed out a truism I first had come across in a book back in 2013. The gist was this: for many folks, their point of reference is the time period during which they are living.

The Cape Cod National Seashore wildlife biologist made the comment as we talked about changes in the creatures that more and more are calling the seashore home.

"It's really hard trying to convince people that their point in time for defining normal is an aberration," said Dr. Cook.

The comment came during a conversation that moved from gray seals and great white sharks to fishers, sharp-shinned hawks, and even black bears and bobcats. Some are long-missing species, some are newcomers that don't seem to have roots in the Cape. But habitat on this curved stretch of Massachusetts seems to be improving to their liking.

A black bear gained widespread attention back in 2012 when it was presumed that it swam 500 feet across the Cape Cod Canal to visit the popular vacation grounds. He seems to have been an outlier, or maybe a forward scout, as a search of records dating to the 1700s failed to turn up another bear on the Cape.



Gray seals, here with harbor seals spotted near Chatham, can weigh up to 800 pounds and chow down on more than 30 pounds of fish a day/Meghann Murray, NEFSC/NOAA Gray seals, here with harbor seals spotted near Chatham, can weigh up to 800 pounds and chow down on more than 30 pounds of fish a day/Meghann Murray, NEFSC/NOAA

Dr. Cook's comment about what is normal, and what might not be considered normal, came during a discussion of the return of gray seals to the Cape's waters. Though cute and photogenic to some, these seals can grow into 800-pound mammalian torpedos of blubber and muscle that cause an uproar among commercial fishermen, surfcasters, and even swimmers looking to cool off a hot summer day with a jump into the Atlantic from one of the seashore's beaches. Part of the problem these 15,000 or so gray seals have brought to the Cape's waters are in the form of great white sharks.

'Certainly, there's lots of controversy relating to the recovery of seal populations in New England," the biologist said. "The seal populations of New England were subjected to bounties from the late 1800s until the 1960s or thereabouts, and then of course the Marine Mammal Protection Act went into effect in (1972). Essentially you have a population of adults, including myself, that grew up during a period of time when seals were exceedingly rare in this part of the country. And a whole way of life developed in the absence of seals that is now considered to be the norm.

'And now that there are seals here, there's a whole bunch of people who are concerned that the presence of seals makes it impossible for them to go fishing, that you can no longer engage in surf fishing, they're stealing all of the fish from the commercial fishermen, and they're attracting great white sharks and now it's not safe to go swimming," he added. "Certain portions of the population are convinced that seals represent the end of life as we know it.'

Along with the gray seals, which seemed to rebound in the Cape's waters beginning in the 1980s, in recent years the national seashore has attracted fishers, a member of the weasel family; a nesting pair of sharp-shinned hawks (in 2013) and; even coyotes, which are an opportunistic, not a native, species.

"We're expecting one of these days that bobcats will show up. They've been working their way into southeastern Massachusetts," Dr. Cook said. "There's been a whole host of these mammal species that have been sort of working their way back into southern New England as the forests mature. They seem to be managing to move back to reoccupy this portion. All of these areas of course were part of the original range of these species prior to the arrival of Europeans, so to the greatest extent that the habitat will allow, they're slowly reoccupying that range.'



This sharp-shinned hawk was spotted nesting on Cape Cod in 2013/Mark Faherty, Massachusetts Audubon Society This sharp-shinned hawk was spotted nesting on Cape Cod in 2013/Mark Faherty, Massachusetts Audubon Society

How mature the Cape's forests are growing was evidenced by the nesting hawks as, the biologist pointed out, they are "a disturbance-sensitive forest-nesting species."

"So now the forests are starting to get more mature and we're having larger patches of forest that allow for more forest interior habitat developing inside the park," he said.

To someone traveling the Cape in the late 1700s and 1800s, such forests would have seemed out of place.

"Most of Cape Cod prior to the arrival of Europeans was forest. Which doesn't mean that everything was forest, but most of it was," said Dr. Cook. "And at the time that (Henry David) Thoreau walked out here in the 1850s or thereabout, he described Cape Cod as an open, treeless plain. And that of course was indicative of the cutting down of much of the forest for a variety of reasons during the Colonial and agrarian era. So, now if you were to look at say Google Earth and look at Cape Cod, you'd see that quite a lot of the park is now incipient forest. It's starting to get more and more mature as the years go by.'

Now, while Thoreau saw open plain, he also saw lots of gray seals and their predators, great white sharks, the biologist noted.

'There are some folks out there who, between the sharks, the gray seal and the piping plover, believe the Cape Cod way of life is threatened," Dr. Cook told me. 'As I said, I think we're all guilty of this. Everybody thinks that the conditions that define 'normal' in the world are the conditions that existed when you came of age. So again, for a whole bunch of people my age -- I'm 61 years old -- growing up in the middle to latter part of the 20th century, a world without seals is what we considered to be 'normal' in this part of the world. You can't imagine that 100 years previous to that there were lots of seals out there.

"It's really hard trying to convince people that their point in time for defining normal is an aberration," he added. "I don't know whether it's humans in general, but we Americans particularly seem uninterested in what history has to tell us in terms of informing us about things.'