Harbor seal reports stay along California’s Pacific coast, where protected beaches, rocky headlands, bays, and estuaries offer places to rest near feeding water. Coastal access points concentrate observers, while offshore animals and closed pupping areas are much less evenly reported.
The monthly pattern is broad, with its strongest total in April rather than the July to August wording in the older scaffold. Spring breeding activity, calmer viewing days, and shore traffic can all affect what gets documented.
A busy haul-out can generate many observations from the same small stretch of coast. That makes report clusters useful for locating watched sites, but they don’t count the seals using California’s wider coastal waters.
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