A team of 15 is caring for him around the clock. His favorite toy is a plastic bucket. He has taken swimmingly to a large pool. And on Friday, he had his first taste of solid food — surf clams.RTWT.
“He’s hitting every milestone we’re hoping to see,” said Jon Forrest Dohlin, director of the New York Aquarium in Coney Island, Brooklyn, part of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “He still has some issues with his bladder, but they are trending in the right direction. Behaviorally, he’s doing great and we’re feeling good about his progress.”
He was describing Mitik, or Mit for short, one of two walrus calves separated from a herd in the Artic Ocean and orphaned in Alaska in July. The Alaska SeaLife Center took them in and found new homes for each. (The other walrus, Pakak, went to the Indianapolis Zoo.) The New York Aquarium, eager for a young companion for its two older walruses, stepped up, flying a staff member, Martha Hiatt, to Alaska to work with Mit for a month.
On Oct. 11, Ms. Hiatt, the aquarium’s behavioral husbandry supervisor, along with a veterinarian, accompanied Mit on a FedEx cargo jet from Anchorage to Newark. The walrus, believed to be about 16 weeks old, stayed in his crate during the six-hour flight. “It was loud,” Ms. Hiatt said of the trip. “He pretty much sang to us the entire time. We stayed with him, talked to him and hosed him off now and then.”
At the aquarium, Mit has adapted to his new environment, a state-of-the-art medical facility built in 2008 that was designed for marine mammals. There is a large, eight-foot-deep pool that is a considerable leap from the one he used in Alaska. “He’s in it from the time he wakes up to the time he goes to sleep,” Ms. Hiatt said this week. “He’s a big swimmer. He plays and swims literally until he falls asleep.”
Trainers are worried the walrus will not warm up to his own species when they prepare him for exhibition at the zoo. I guess they should have thought more about that when they decided not to return him to the wild.
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