Kind: captions
Language: en
you're watching a Nova Video
podcast to the people who have journeyed
here the walrus has always been an
emblem of the Bearing Sea its
peculiarity is its charm in 1915 the
crew on the Herman attempted to adopt
one and make it their mascot but the
walrus is hardly an ideal pet it is only
at home in the Arctic where it is
perfectly adapted to the sea ice and the
cold
water the upic hunters of St Lawrence
know its habits very well well when the
walrus is feeding you know they go down
to the dive down to the bottom of the
sea and they use their whiskers while
they're diving this whiskers are moving
in the
sand so when they find clams they use
their tusks to dig them out basically
they use their tusks for just about
anything you know B orus they used their
tusks for
fighting even for uh getting up on Ice
they had their tusks you coming up out
of the water and they put their tusks
you know Ram them right in the ice and
they call they're climbing up they pull
themselves
up to the people of St Lawrence Island
The Walrus has another meaning it's a
critical source of food crucial for
their survival when I was a little guy I
was trained to do some hunting of walrus
and other games and that's that's that's
how why it's very important for us to um
hunt walrus most mostly uh because it
keeps our health uh very healthy you
know it's it's a very good clean food
wallers is what we grew up on and it's
uh of the three primary sea mammals the
whale the wus and the seel I think uh
95% of the meat comes from the waters we
go out we take our boats out and we get
our crew members together we get our
rifles and we just go out and um we go
on top of these big ice chunks know that
build up pretty
high we take our B knocks and go up
there and look for
wers worries start soon as they leave
the house we don't know how the waters
will be we don't know how the wind is
going to if it's going to pick up we
don't know if there'll be a
storm when there's a lot of crew members
there's a lot of family to feed and it's
sometimes when we're coming back it gets
windy and
wavy
it's kind of dangerous but you know I'm
used to it I was born in
1959 when I it's 5 years old um by
Thanksgiving the men would be out in the
ice it would be solid ice and now the
ice is coming in like
December even sometimes January that's
coming in real
late the risks are higher because we
have to go out
further but we cannot do without the
food this is the Waller hide that I
sliced up earlier this is the Waller
meat that we cook pretty not too well
this is the heart these are the berries
the black and the salmon berries and
this is the walrus liver which we
fry because
everybody some people can eat certain
food so we have a variety and then
um my Seafood is
here this will
be oh don't don't forget you got to eat
your veggies
too we eat the whole part of the
walers it's just like people in the
lower 48 or elsewhere in the world
farming
they we're just doing that except that
we hunt for this we call RC Farm also
because we live from it uh that's how
important is to cast wal and other games
so we could live and uh store our away
food so we could eat them until the next
Harvest
comes native Hunters are relying on uh
traditions of observing from a hunter's
perspective about which animals come
when different ice conditions present
themselves when different seasons come
and
go they're using a tradition that's been
developed over 2 to 4,000 years in a
vocabulary that's very different from
ours we're
integrating benic studies with walrus
movement studies with sea ice imagery to
get a large picture of what's going on
here we use very different tools to find
out how walrus move uh in this part of
the
world most of the scientist tools are an
array of high technology satellites
radio tags a kit to sample walrus
DNA but one piece of Geer looks a lot
like a traditional Hunter tool the
crossbow it may seem a bit ancient to
use a crossbow to apply a very modern
radio tag that's going to communicate
with
satellites but the crossbow is very
accurate the big thing is it allows us
to apply radios to walrus without having
to capture them without having to
directly handle them last 5 6 years
we've applied radio tags to over 100
walrus but to tag a walrus you must get
close to it this means the scientists
need to spot a distant herd then hike as
much as a mile across the sea
ice the scientists wear white suits as
camouflage to blend in with the snow and
they approach the herd from downwind
since walrus are sensitive to
smell when we out um trying to tag the
walus who are sitting watching them my
job was to be the polar bear guard you
can hear these very eerie sounds coming
up through the ice and around me and the
sounds of walrus and bearded
seal it was so surreal it felt like it
was on another the
planet we tank
one and uh we missed one that glanced
off lost the tank we also had a small te
tech technical difficulty with another
radio we need to work on our sights we
compensate another one by uh taking
Perry's advice who knows how to hunt
wers pretty well I said just run up to
them and shoot at close range that
weren't that W great so the sights are a
bit off but uh but there's a good Fe to
get them on uh using the local
knowledge tonight I'll send an email
back to our office and I fell there
we'll we'll start the processing of the
satellite data by tomorrow morning we
should have uh some locations on the
walrus that we're radio taged
today the satellite sends back data that
shows if a tagged walrus is swimming
feeding or resting on the
ice thus it tells us how long a walrus
has to search for food and how much sea
ice is available walrus is need sea ice
they often feed in patches miles from
the shore and there's no place else for
them to rest but on the
ice there's thought that uh during the
summer that we may not we may have no
sea ice whatsoever potentially in the
next couple decades there are some
models that say perhaps even by the year
2012 we may have no sea ice anywhere in
the Arctic Ocean in the
summertime um probably the the consensus
is somewhere around 2030 but still
that's uh that's in the the near future
that's in our generation that's our
lifetime that's not our children that's
not our grandchildren that's that's
us I personally believe
that what little tribes there are left
in this world are are really
endangered
um a way of life that God gave to us as
as a gift is is on the verge of being
lost once it's lost you can never get it
back if all the ice melts this island
won't be in existent no more it'll be
underwater