We opened the door, and it was a wall of blubber.” The walruses gather “out of desperation, not out of choice,” David Attenborough says over the resulting footage. “We could hear tusks scraping along the side of the walls. “It was like 100,000 Chewbaccas outside,” says Lanfear. The animals arrived almost overnight, while the team slept in a cramped hut. With Kochnev’s help, the seven-person Our Planet team filmed one of the largest haul-out sites-a single beach where 100,000 walruses tessellate into a solid red mat of tusks and blubber. When he started, haul-outs were rare in the northerly Chukchi Sea now many sites there regularly heave with walruses. When he started, only males gathered on these sites now females and calves do too, and many are trampled in the scrum. These haul-outs aren’t new events, but they were once rarer, smaller, and less dangerous, according to Anatoly Kochnev, a Russian naturalist who has studied walruses for 36 years. As these icy platforms have retreated, walruses have increasingly been forced to haul out onto solid land-in the thousands. But in recent years, Arctic sea ice has been thinner and sparser. In the summer, Pacific walruses forage for shellfish in the waters between Alaska and Russia, before hauling up onto sea ice to rest and raise their young.
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Read: Netflix’s Our Planet says what other nature series have omitted “This is the sad reality of climate change,” Lanfear told me. Then why? What were walruses even doing on cliff tops in the first place? Our Planet offers a clear answer. The camera crews were filming from afar so their scents and sounds wouldn’t spook the skittish animals. Why would a walrus? Polar bears weren’t harassing them. Contrary to popular belief, not even lemmings dive off cliffs.
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Our Planet makes a point of saying what other nature series have not-the wonders they’re showing are endangered because of humans-and the footage is perhaps the most shocking part of a series full of discomfiting moments. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever filmed,” says Jamie McPherson, a cameraman, on a behind-the-scenes video. The team had heard hints about such falls, but were still unprepared for the shock of seeing them. Some have internal injuries, get to the sea, and wash up later,” says Sophie Lanfear, who led a documentary crew that recorded the behavior for Our Planet-Netflix’s big-budget answer to Planet Earth. “A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.” And a walrus? “Many just die on impact, or they crush the ones they fall on below. A mouse “gets a slight shock and walks away,” he wrote. Haldane once wrote a famous essay in which he described what large falls do to progressively larger animals. Climb, plummet, cartwheel, bounce: These are not walrus-associated verbs. It doesn’t expect to plummet for 260 feet, cartwheel through the air, bounce off the rocks, and crash abruptly. So you might imagine that a walrus, peering off a tall cliff, doesn’t really understand what will happen to it when it steps off. When they fall, they flop off those low platforms into the accommodating water. When these animals encounter hard surfaces, they rise up to meet them, hauling their two-ton bulks onto floating pieces of ice. Usually, gravity is no enemy of the walrus. In the autumn of 2017, about 250 walruses in Russia, having climbed up to rocky slopes overlooking a beach, just walked over the edge.
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