Harp seals spend winters in the waters off Newfoundland, and it is common for them to go ashore at times, and to swim into bays like the long, narrow ocean inlet that borders Roddickton-Bide Arm, said Garry Stenson, head of the marine mammal section at Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

“Then if the ice freezes up behind them, they have a harder time getting access to water,” he told the Canadian broadcaster, CBC. “It’s almost like they get going in a direction and just keep going, hoping that they’re going to eventually find water that way.”

At first the seals in Roddickton-Bide Arm, each one about five feet long and weighing about 300 pounds, crowded around the town’s two brooks that do not freeze over in the winter. Then they spread out, rolling around in the deep snow and barking like dogs. Residents began to worry that the seals were there to stay through the winter — or might starve.

“They’re very cute little creatures,” Ms. Fitzgerald in a telephone interview. “They look so calm when you just look at them, they look so cute but they’re still wild animals.”