National Geographic: Mikhail Verevkin points his spyglass toward the Gulf of Finland and squints into the distance.
"One, two, three. ..." He counts 19 animals lounging on rocks before looking up.
They are all gray seals. The Baltic ringed seal is nowhere to be found.
It's April 20, the time of year when seal scientists like Verevkin, who works for the Russian Academy of Sciences, fly over the Baltic Sea to count numbers of the Baltic ringed seal, a marine mammal that, unlike the gray seal, is totally dependent...