Walruses were formerly very abundant in Bering Sea, especially about the Fur Seal Islands and along the coast north of the Peninsula of Alaska, but few now survive there. Owing to the value of their thick skins, blubber, and ivory tusks, they have been subjected to remorseless pursuit since the early Russian occupation of their territory and have, as a result, become extinct in parts of their former range and the species is now in serious danger of extermination.
Like many of the seals, walruses have a strong social instinct, and although usually seen in herds they are not polygamous. They feed mainly on clams or other shellfish, which they gather on the bottom of the shallow sea. On shore or on the ice they move slowly and with much difficulty, but in the water they are thoroughly at home and good swimmers. When hauled out on land or ice, they usually lie in groups one against the other. They are stupid beasts and hunters have no difficulty in killing them with rifles at close range.
Walruses have a strongly developed maternal instinct and show great devotion and disregard of their own safety in defending the young. The Eskimos at Cape Vancouver, Bering Sea, hunt them in frail skin-covered kyaks, using ivory- or bone-pointed spears and seal-skin floats. Several hunters told me of exciting and dangerous encounters they had experienced with mother walruses. If the young are attacked, or even approached, the mother does not hesitate to charge furiously. The hunters confess that on such occasions there is no option but to paddle for their lives. Occasionally an old walrus is unusually vindictive and, after forcing a hunter to take refuge on the ice, will remain patrolling the vicinity for a long time, roaring and menacing the object of her anger.
When boats approach the edge of the ice where walruses are hauled up, the animals plunge into the sea in a panic and rise all about the intruders, bellowing and rushing about, rearing their huge heads and gleaming white tusks high out of water in an alarming manner. As a rule, however, they are timid and seek only to escape, although occasionally, in their excitement, one has been known to attack a boat and by a single blow of its tusks to do serious damage and endanger the crew.
ALASKA FUR SEAL (Callorhinus alascanus)
Several species of fur seals are known, all of them limited to the southern oceans or the coasts and islands of the North Pacific. All are strongly gregarious and formerly sought their island breeding grounds in vast numbers. At one period, soon after the purchase of Alaska, it was estimated that several million fur seals were on the Pribilof Islands in one season. During the height of their abundance the southern fur seals were equally numerous.
The value of their skins and the facility with which these animals may be slaughtered have resulted in the practical extermination of all but those which breed under governmental protection on the Russian islands off the coast of Kamchatka and on the Pribilof Islands in Alaska. Owing mainly to wasteful pelagic sealing prior to the recent international treaty, the numbers on both these groups of islands were much reduced.
The Alaska fur seal is a migratory species, wintering down the Pacific coast as far as northern California. The migrations of these seals are of remarkable interest. In spring they leave the northwest coast and many of them travel steadily across more than two thousand miles of the North Pacific. For days at a time they swim through a roaring gale-swept sea, under dense, low-hanging clouds, and with unerring certainty strike certain passages in the Aleutian Islands, through which they press to their breeding grounds, more than 100 miles beyond, on the small, fog-hidden Pribilof Islands.
Fur seals are extremely polygamous and the old males, which weigh from 400 to 500 pounds, “haul up” first on the breeding beaches. Each bull holds a certain area, and as the females, only one-fifth his size, come ashore they are appropriated by the nearest bulls until each “beach master” gathers a harem, sometimes containing more than 100 members.
Here the young are born, and after the mating season the seals, which have remained ashore without food from four to six weeks, return to the water. The mothers go and come, and each is able to find her young with certainty among thousands of apparently identical woolly black “pups.”