They get more beach time

The shores of Siberia’s Chukchi Peninsula have been littered with the carcasses of young walruses.

Warmer winters have meant less ice, which in turn has kept walruses on the beach longer through the summer and fall.

Stampedes are common, often resulting in crushed babies.

That brings the scavengers: polar bears. They often come close to villages, and last year killed two people.

The problem became so bad that the Siberians reached across the Bering Strait, seeking help from their more polar-bear-experienced kin in Alaska.

Charlie Johnson, a 68-year-old Inuit from Nome, answered the call. He spent three weeks last spring on an international mission to help scare off the bears.

“You confront them with a stick, so the bear thinks it is a tusk,” Johnson said. “Then you start talking to them.”

Another technique is simply firing a blank shotgun shell at their faces.

The Siberians’ problem was a cruel irony to Johnson.

On his side of the strait, in Nome, the Inuit hunting season for walruses is in the spring. Rising temperatures, which melt the giant chunks of floating sea ice where walruses cluster, are shortening the season.

In the past few years, Johnson has had to go without his favorite dish sometimes.

“There’s nothing finer than walrus liver,” he lamented.