Plummeting to a terrible fate . . . the walruses forced on to deadly cliffs by shrinking sea ice
VIEWERS of Sir David Attenborough’s Our Planet series could be forgiven for watching through their fingers, as a oneton walrus lurches ever closer to the edge of a 300ft cliff.
Then, in shocking slow-motion, horror unfolds on screen as the huge mammal plunges to its death on to a beach below. The site in the Russian Arctic is crammed with hundreds of other dead Pacific walruses.
Narrator Sir David tells viewers that, rather than being a bizarre act of mass animal suicide, the tragic scene is a consequence of climate change.
The walruses’ old fishing grounds of sea ice have melted due to global warming, forcing them to travel to the coast 40 miles away to find fish. The result is 100,000 exhausted walruses packing on to a beach.
To avoid the jostling for space, some of the smaller walruses climb cliffs to find room but do not know how to get down, and their eyesight is poor. ‘They struggle up the cliffs – an extraordinary challenge for a one-ton animal used to sea ice,’ Sir David says in the programme streamed on Netflix.
‘As they get hungry, they need to return to the sea. In their desperation to do so, hundreds fall from heights they should never have scaled.’
Producer Sophie Lanfear was in tears as she and cameraman Jamie McPherson filmed the walruses falling to their deaths.
She said: ‘On the cliff, they teeter then just kind of walk off. It’s really hard to witness. It’s just so heartbreaking.’