Feb. 6, 2006 — Several herds of gray seals were nearly wiped out by a freak blizzard after coming ashore in eastern Canada to escape an unusually mild winter and deliver their offspring this week, officials told AFP Friday.

The seals, which usually give birth on icebergs floating in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, came ashore on Canada's Atlantic coast because warmer than usual weather had melted the ice, fisheries officials said.

But they received a cool welcome.

Some 2,000 to 3,000 seals on tiny Pictou Island were struck by a "severe" storm that buried Canada's eastern Maritimes region in snow and kicked up high waves and strong winds Wednesday and Thursday.

Island resident Jane MacDonald told AFP by telephone that she awoke Thursday morning to see "wall to wall seals" and their puppies on four kilometers (2.5 miles) of beaches "decimated" by the storm.

"It was traumatizing," she said. "The seal puppies were literally swept away into the water because their mothers couldn't get them to higher ground."

Mothers nudged their newborn babies to try to keep them afloat. Gray seal pups can swim from birth, but their muscles are weak.

"A wave would hit and the pup went under. The mother pushed it up with her nose, and then another wave would hit. After the sixth or seventh wave, the pup didn't come up," MacDonald said.

"The more you watched, the worse it got. The mothers struggled so hard to save their babies and it just couldn't be done," she said. "I'd never seen anything like that."

Michel Therien, a Canadian fisheries and oceans department spokesman, said "thousands more" seals had landed on a dozen other local islands and Nova Scotia province coasts and suffered the same fate.

He estimates that 75 percent of the gray seal pups born in the region in recent days perished. Many that survived have been orphaned.

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