well this time of year New Jersey welcomes some seasonal guests along the shore and one group is working over time to protect them seals travel to our area to wait for warmer Waters up north and experts from The Marine Mammal stranding Center say for various reasons the animals are at increased risk of getting stranded here during winter months Ted Goldberg visited with the team who keeps their eyes and ears on the water looking for distressed seals to get them back home [Music] it might not sound like it but three seals are on the road to recovery at the Marine Mammal stranding Center in Brigantine nice easy start to the season um kind of gets us in the groove um till things start getting crazy um depending on the the the year uh if the weather's a little bit worse uh we'll see more strandings the animals who just get beat up by the weather stranding coordinator Jay Pagel says these seals were stranded away from their friends and family and needed to be rescued just like some New Jersey beachgoers who enjoy seeing them the seals start heading south just before winter so we're in the middle of stranding season our seal season usually starts uh late November uh beginning of December and then it'll extend right through about May or June uh when the seals stop coming in uh they're seasonal so they come down here for the winter and then they'll head back North uh when the the water starts warming up the number of seals under their care can vary a lot since the center responds to roughly 130 Mi of ocean front coast and sometimes they respond to other states a few years back we had uh one season where we responded to 15 animals in one day uh physically laid hands on 11 of them um and then the following year we had a total of 15 animals admitted in the rehab Pagel says more seals are becoming stranded in New Jersey because there are more of them to begin with they were hunted almost to Extinction uh then they gained protection back in the early 70s and since then their numbers have been uh multiplying they've been doing really good uh as far as breeding stock um nice nice healthy population and uh just growing and they're coming back into the areas that they used to be historically uh historically back in the 17 1800s they were abundant here almost year round while the seals don't have names they have compelling stories this harbor seal was bitten by a shark and swam away the stranding center scooped him up on Christmas Day on LBI so he's got a heat Blas eration across his hip and he's got corresponding bite marks on the opposite side on his on his left hip as well Pagel says he can go free in a few weeks until then he'll be well fed is are celin it's a small smelt type fish um not very high in fat but it's something that they uh these guys are used to eating in the North Atlantic and he'll use these tanks to swim and regain his strength with trained professionals watching how he recovers and naps Pagel says the center's volunteers are good at spotting seals in distress compared to seals just loafing around years of experience basically is how we basically determine how you know if they're if they need help or not um in most cases it's pretty obvious you'll see discharge from their eyes their mouth their nose if they're sick you'll see that they're underweight uh if they have obvious injuries uh we see that quite a bit uh either from shark bites or propeller wounds or other injuries that they get from climbing up on rocks once the seals are released back into the wild they can cover a lot of ground or ocean quickly they can Cruise around 30 mph um if they really wanted to generally they don't move that quickly but they can um and they're also covering a lot of ground like these little gray seals they're being born up around New England and they're coming down here swimming you know anywhere from 3 to 800 miles uh just to get here um and these little gray seals are just a few weeks old the center says if you see seals on the beach you should admire them from a distance preferably 50 yards and if you think a seal might need some help give the center a call in Brigantine I'm Ted Goldberg NJ Spotlight [Music] news