Summer is supposedly right around the corner and marine mammals are heading our way \u2014 some have already arrived.<\/p>\n
A leopard seal (above) turned up at Ocean View Beach yesterday, sunning itself on the sand, looking quite relaxed.<\/p>\n
Leopard seals are easily identified by their long slender body and comparatively sizable fore-flippers.<\/p>\n
The leopard seal\u2019s disproportionately large head, massive jaws, impressive teeth and tremendous gape give it a snake-like appearance.<\/p>\n
The one spotted was about 2.7m long.<\/p>\n
They were a rare sight in New Zealand waters for a long time, but are popping up on what seems like a more regular basis, now classified as a resident species.<\/p>\n
Any sighting of them should be recorded with the Department of Conservation (Doc).<\/p>\n
On Monday night, golfers at Chisholm Park had something of an added obstacle on the 18th green.<\/p>\n
A sea lion waddled across the green (left) about 7.50pm, to the surprise of players.<\/p>\n
The breeding season is not far away and golfers at Chisholm Park will be hoping Monday\u2019s visiting sea lion does not get too comfortable on the 18th green.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Summer is supposedly right around the corner and marine mammals are heading our way \u2014 some have already…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":130611,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":{"0":"post-130610","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130610\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}