Cape Schmidt, September 2023
From the new one. On the traverse of Cape Schmidt
The ice in the Chukchi Sea now held all summer and autumn, until the very beginning of freezing. There was very little of it, some small fields caught on capes and islands, and did not melt. If you look at the scale of the entire Pacific sector of the Arctic, these ice floes were completely invisible, because for the most part the Chukchi Sea, like all the last twenty years, was clear by the end of August. But even those small preserved hints of ice had a great impact on the animal world, and in particular on walruses.
Walruses have been drifting comfortably on ice floes all summer, rarely appearing off the west coast. September began, the ice was crushed by autumn storms, they were getting smaller, but they did not completely disappear. Even in the midst of the autumn migration, I noticed only one eccentric walrus that sailed into the bay and stayed here for several days, and a couple of times I heard a roar from afar. Walruses were moving towards the Bering Strait somewhere out of sight, and the chances of watching them closer tended to zero.
At the end of September, another storm broke out, which scattered a large ice field in the Long Strait. It began to subside when a friend called me, who said that while he was outside the village, he heard the cries of walruses somewhere in the west. It was getting dark, I was cooking dinner, but just in case, I leaned out the window and listened. And indeed! These were not isolated rare cries, but the cohesive roar of a large group of walruses.
By nightfall, the roar was already coming from everywhere, and you didn’t even need to open the window to hear it. The staccato barking of the walruses was answered by the coordinated barking of dozens of village dogs. The communication between dogs and walruses did not stop all night so intensely that I had to use earplugs before going to bed.
The people in the village were worried. For them, such a roar meant that the walruses had approached Kozhevnikov Cliff and would try to get out to the rookery at night. And it was not in the interests of the villagers at all. Walruses near the village are a heavy smell, the corpses of crushed relatives, and a little later dozens of polar bears who will come to feast on carrion, and at the same time scare people and dogs. A couple of people shared their concerns with me, but I calmed them down. If there is ice near the shore, then walruses will not rest on the shore.
The maximum that can happen is that they will get out on the ice near the shore, but the ice deposits are arranged in a completely different way than the coastal ones. There will be no corpses, no consequences in the form of polar bears. And they will rest here for a short time, because at the end of September there is no reason for them to linger in large numbers in the west of the sea. They are waiting for much richer forage waters in the area of the Bering Strait.
At dawn I went ashore. Walruses were screaming from all sides, but the thick fog and snowfall did not allow them to be seen. In a short period of improved visibility, I managed to notice two deposits on small ice floes about two kilometers from the shore. What a shame! I have long wanted to take a bird’s-eye view of walruses on the ice using a quadcopter. And now the opportunity has appeared, but the nasty weather does not allow you to fly such a distance!
I didn’t bite my elbows for long. After sitting in the fog for half an hour and being covered with thick flakes of snow, I noticed that the walruses were screaming most intensely from the side of Weber’s Cliff. This cliff protrudes quite strongly into the sea, and it is hoped that the local current brought ice floes with walruses close to the cliff. This means that you can work with binoculars and a quadcopter from the cliff. I called my good friend, Maxim Deminov, a member of the Rykai Bear Patrol and a wonderful nature photographer.
He had an ATV on the move, and I persuaded him to go to the cliff. When we got to the tip, the snow began to fall less frequently and with pauses, the fog lifted. And I saw a beautiful picture! More than one and a half thousand walruses, located on several dozen flat ice floes, with contented grunts and barks drifted past the cape to the east, to the narrow funnel of the Bering Strait, passing through which they would find themselves in wintering areas in the Bering Sea.
And my dream of shooting walruses with a quadcopter from the air was completely satisfied)))
From an old one. The hard work of being a mom
You need to keep an eye on the children! It’s good, at least my daughter is always there, an obedient girl, she won’t step aside, she clings to her mother. But a tomboy…
Insatiable, horror-horror, always demanding milk. And how he pumps, he’s looking for adventures on his fluffy ass! Then he’ll run on thin ice and fall through, then he runs around with wet fur in the cold and won’t catch a cold, you bastard! Then he gets into a fight with the neighbor’s Mind, but the Mind is a year older and three times heavier. Here’s my bully who always comes back with a scratched nose…
Then he’ll fall behind, get lost somewhere behind a hummock and let’s rush back and forth, roar all over the neighborhood. And I immediately have a panic attack, pressure and, in general, stress – what if a hungry male gets under his paw?! And the men are in our area, no matter who you poke at, it’s all yours…
Rumor has it that murderers often come across among them, an innocent baby will be deprived of life at once, they will not regret it. There is no sweetness with my son! And now, before he could tear himself away from the tit, he was already turning his head around – as if to smoke something. While I’m around, I need to take a nap for at least a minute or two. I’m tired, exhausted, and… that’s it, I’m sleeping…
The polar bears have missed you!
- Mom, do you remember a long time ago, when I was very young, we met such a funny clumsy bear here, who walked on his hind legs and considered himself big and scary? Did he also have some kind of strange skin, the hair grew only on his muzzle, and there were such small transparent ice cubes sticking out on his nose?
- You’re funny yourself, Umka… You were very small not a long time ago, but only last year, and even earlier you were in my tummy until you were born. But I remember the bear with the ice cubes. He was in these parts last year and the year before that. And it seems to me that I saw him in other places when I was a little bear like you.
- Only it’s not a bear, it’s a man. However, he’s a little weird and doesn’t look like other people you and I have met. There was sometimes something normal, bearish about him. Maybe some great-grandmother of his was a bear, I don’t know…
- But it was fun with him! We played catch–up games – at first we ran after him, and when he grabbed a long stick, we ran away from him. We had a lot of fun! I wish I could do it again!
- I feel like we’ll meet again, and you’ll have a chance to play. Come on, let’s wait a bit.
Well… we must go, since they are waiting!
I will return to the Internet at the end of October or in November. Don’t destroy the planet before I get back. You are welcome!
By Anatoly Kochnev
