Harbor seals are winter visitors to New Jersey’s coast, with Sandy Hook producing by far the strongest named-place cluster in this dataset. Barnegat Bay and waters near Edwin B. Forsythe add records farther south. Look from shore and keep well back from hauled-out seals; resting animals need space, and apparent inactivity is not an invitation to approach.
The monthly record is emphatically seasonal: sightings build in December, peak from January through March, and fall to almost none in summer. The generic “year-round” label in the metadata reflects at least one report in scattered months, not regular summer presence.
Full species profile
