A walrus on holiday

Looking out into what one hopes is the last kick of winter, with sleet squalls blotting out the islands and the ocean steeped in foam, I both wonder what has become of this coast's improbable Easter visitor and find myself more at home with the idea of him. Or her. Whichever the walrus turns out to have been.

Glimpsed far off, as an unfamiliar head in the waves, its appearance would have been dramatic enough, but acceptably in context: strange things happen at sea. But a brick-red walrus with real ivory tusks and wrinkled skin, lolling on a rock near Old Head, within a stone's throw of grazing sheep, oblivious of holiday traffic and, praise be, young Mr Paul Cotter's camera, was almost surrealistically disturbing. Walruses belong in the Arctic, with the polar bears. The only ones I've ever seen close up were chivvied off an ice floe in East Greenland by a helicopter's brutal wind. And now a walrus has spent an Easter Saturday afternoon on the shore below Croagh Patrick, its snooze snapped in Fujicolor for the edification of science.

A "rare vagrant" - but how rare is rare? One was seen in the Shannon in 1897, one was shot off Co Kerry in the 1920s: two records in a century. But in the past 10 or 15 years, the number of sightings has been growing.

Dr Don Cotton, the Sligo ecologist who is compiling walrus records, thinks perhaps 10 of them so far will emerge as authentic. Among them is a 1988 sighting by four Co Sligo fishermen of a walrus on offshore rocks near Rathlee, and an encounter near Malin Head in the same year, by a boatload of five wildlife rangers (who unaccountably neglected to write it up). There have been others in the 1990s, and perhaps still more to come, from people who haven't known who to tell, or didn't realise their sightings were important.

In Britain, nearly all the records are from Scotland: 26 between 1815 and 1954 and a further seven in the next 40 years. Aberdeen (with its heavy trawler traffic) has been a particular focus of reports, and also the Shetland Islands, where a walrus stayed for three months in the autumn of 1926.

With Ireland's new awareness of wildlife, more maritime activity and more binoculars around more necks, Dr Cotton confidently expects walrus sightings to increase. The current glimpses, he believes, could all be of the same few animals which, having wandered south to Ireland, have found enough easy food to keep them within reach. Where they are not hunted for ivory, leather or dog food, walruses can live for 30 years.

The Atlantic walrus, Odobenus rosmarus, a somewhat slighter and less fearsome-looking creature than its Pacific counterpart, can still measure 4 metres long in the adult male and weigh over a tonne. The bull has the longer tusks - actually upper canine teeth - but these rarely reach more than 35 cm, not the metre of the Bering Sea giants.

Is he dangerous? Very, if you have stuck a harpoon into him. Barry Lopez, in Arctic Dreams, writes of "an unusual sort of walrus - almost always a male, a loner, that deliberately hunts and kills seals" and "will charge off an ice floe to attack a small boat. and actively pursue and try to kill people in the water". It may have been this sort of image that (according to persistent west-coast anecdote) sent some wet-suited surfers thrashing out of the sea when "a pair" of walruses appeared in their vicinity last autumn at Easky, Co Sligo.

There is some evidence of walrus predation on seals, though it is hard to imagine how they eat them. For the animals in general, male and female, the tusks are used to rake clams, cockles and mussels (perhaps also, in Clew Bay, ancient native oysters) out of the sea-bed. Their mouth-pads, with stiff, quill-like bristles called vibrissae, help the walrus to locate the shellfish in murky water, and the heavy lips and tongue suck the molluscs out of their shells. In the Arctic, a feed of 1,000 clams is not unusual.

In their usual setting, the walruses live at the edge of ice, or among floes, where the ice remains thin enough to break from underneath with a stiff bash of the head. They can dive down for food to 80 metres and stay submerged for eight minutes with heartbeats slowed.

Most walruses migrate southwards in winter, as the ice advances, often ending up in shallow coastal waters and hauling out on reefs and islets, their communal breath condensing into fog. But April is the month of their northward return. During this long migration the pregnant females give birth to single pups, on the ice. Quite unlike other sea mammals, they suckle their calves for 18 months and keep them even longer while they learn to find their own food.

This strong migratory rhythm, keyed to a lifestyle evolving so closely with ice and low temperatures, makes any perennial presence of walruses around north-west Ireland a hugely intriguing affair. It is tempting to reach for some aspect of global warming - a change in the pattern and extent of ice floes, for example - to explain it. But the chances are that, as Don Cotton suspects, this is a long-standing quirk of wildlife behaviour that, with enough records, will ultimately fall into place. It's not that many years after all since leatherback turtles were hauled ashore, to die on boat slips as "strange denizens of the deep". Now, fishermen are aware of them as regular summer visitors, and nobody, one likes to think, harasses them on purpose.

If you happen to see a walrus, Dr Cotton would like to know. Do try to make descriptive notes while you're actually looking at it, and give the names and addresses of the friends who saw it too (a photograph, of course, would help). He can be written to at the Sligo Institute of Technology (or e-mailed at ).