New Grafarvogur Resident Looking For Seal Of Approval

The Reykjavík neighborhood of Grafarvogur is now home to an out of the ordinary new resident, a harbour seal, RÚV reports. The most recent neighbour to the coastal residential area keeps popping up around the harbour, not really minding the attention it attracts.

One of the residents even flew a drone to get a closer look at the cool and relaxed mammal slumping around the harbor, accompanied by seagulls. But it really didn’t seem to mind the presence of the drone or even notice it.

Harbour seals, like the grey seal, are also known to live off the coast of Iceland. The number of animals of this species has decreased significantly over the past few years. Even though seal-hunting has been a common practice ever since the settlement in Iceland, last year, the city of Reykjavík prohibited the hunting of these two species -harbour seal and grey seal- within the city’s jurisdiction.

According to the Marine and Fresh Water Research Institute, while in 1980 there were 33,000 of these animals living along the coast of Iceland, in 2016 there were only around 8,000.

The seal shown above is not the seal in question.