Napping Arctic walrus wakes up in Ireland
A walrus spotted on an Irish beach on 14 March may have floated there from the Arctic Circle after falling asleep on an iceberg.
A five-year-old girl walking with her father spotted the blubbery newcomer. The young girl, named Muireann, pointed out the walrus to her dad, Alan Houlihan, as they walked on Valentia Island in County Kerry. “I thought it was a seal at first, and then we saw the tusks,” Houlihan said. “He kind of jumped up on the rocks. He was massive. He was about the size of a bull or a cow.”
Most walruses (Odobenus rosmarus) live near the Arctic Circle, where they hunt for shellfish in shallow water and clamber up onto the icebergs and beaches to rest. The humongous creatures rarely crop up along the Irish shoreline. The first recorded walrus sighting there occurred in 1897, but no other walruses were seen until the 1980s. Since then, fewer than two dozen additional walruses have been spotted in Ireland.
The washed-up walrus spotted on Valentia Island is thought to be quite young, based on the length of the animal’s tusks. Full-grown walruses can grow tusks as long as one metre, while the recently sighted walrus’ tusks were roughly about 30 centimetres long. The walrus’ body measured more than two metres from snout to tail.
But just how does a young walrus end up all the way in County Kerry? “I’d say what happened is he fell asleep on an iceberg and drifted off, and then he was gone too far, out into the mid-Atlantic or somewhere like that, down off Greenland possibly,” said Kevin Flannery, a marine biologist with the Dingle Oceanworld Aquarium.
“He could also be island-hopping and went to Iceland and on to Shetland, but that’s unlikely. I’d say he came in out of the Atlantic.” After travelling thousands of miles from his home in the Arctic, the walrus is likely exhausted and hungry.
NICOLETTA LANESE