Thursday, October 02, 2014
There weren't any
The usual ecoterrorists are stirring up the usual big putrid stink over a gathering of walruses on the Alaska coast.
As usual I tried checking this against sources from 100 years ago. Googlebooks found a government fisheries report and an article in Smithsonian. Neither source had much to say about walruses near Alaska, except to say that there weren't any walruses. At that time walruses had been hunted nearly to extinction for their tusks. Ivory for pianos was a dollar a pound (= $30 today), so whites and Eskimos killed every walrus they could find. Protective laws came soon thereafter, and walruses began to repopulate.
Now we have too many. So it's not surprising to find thousands of them making a stopover in their seasonal migrations.
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Update 10/21:
Canadian zoologist Dr Susan Crockford assesses the recent mass haulouts of walrus females and calves on the beaches of Alaska and Russia bordering the Chukchi Sea. The events have been blamed by US government biologists and WWF activists on lack of summer sea ice, amplified into alarming scare stories by news media around the world. ... At least two documented incidents of similar magnitude have occurred in the recent past: one in 1978, on eastern St. Lawrence Island and the other in 1972, on the western end of Wrangel Island. The 1978 event involved an estimated total of almost 150,000 walrus hauled out within in a small geographic area. “Blaming lack of sea ice for recent events ignores the documented factor – large population size – that drove walruses onto beaches en masse in the past, when plenty of ice was available."Toldja so. Nature is easy to understand when you think in terms of Nature instead of "thinking" in idiotic mass-murdering wacked-out bizarre apocalyptic psychotic pseudotheories. ¶ 6:32 AM
