Forget the chicken — why did a seal pup cross the road?
A baby seal who’d lost her way was rescued and returned to the wild after she was spotted trying to cross a busy highway at the Jersey Shore.
The gray seal pup was spotted by police attempting to cross Route 35 near Curtis Point Drive in Mantoloking between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay on Monday evening, the Brick Police Department said.
The department called New Jersey’s Marine Mammal Stranding Center [MMSC], which took in the female seal to rest at its facility in Brigantine “after her little adventure,” the organization said.
MMSC said police stopped traffic so the seal could cross the road. The pup then went into a resident’s backyard, where responders kept an eye on her until one of its stranding technicians arrived.
The 36-pound seal was found to be in perfectly good health and in no need of rehabilitation, MMSC said.
After spending a night with MMSC, she was released back into the wild on Tuesday.
“Many people have asked about this unusual behavior,” MMSC wrote in a social media post. “We have had MANY cases over the past 45 years of seals, especially gray seals, taking a wrong turn and wandering up beach access paths to backyards, parking lots, and roadways.”
The pups are usually born on islands, so when they get lost, their natural instinct is to wander around near a body of water, according to MMSC.
“Typically we see at least one case of a wayward pup stranding in an unusual location every seal season,” the organization said.