Animal of the week | Hamina’s walrus was not the only one in Finland – Korkeasaari, or once a walrus cub, disappeared during a stormy night

I’m humming The walrus was not the only walrus found in Finland during modern history.

In Helsinki, Korkeasaari, during the winter war, there was a baby walrus named Turso, but its story has miraculously been forgotten. A mammal biologist working at the University of Helsinki got a hint about the stages of the walrus Henry Pihlström.

The short life of a cod is described by Korkeasaari’s feed master Väinö Lehtonen in a book from 1951 and Helsingin Sanomat also wrote about it at one time.

In summer In 1939, a Norwegian research expedition headed to Greenland. A Finnish hunting party went along, with a wild man and a writer in the background Ludvig Munsterhjelm.

He offered to get animals from the Arctic Ocean on the trip to Korkeasaari. The zoo was interested and made an order: could we have three musk oxen, two walruses and four arctic hares?

50,000 marks were set aside for the purpose, about 20,000 euros in today’s money. The animals were supposed to be shown to guests arriving at the 1940 Summer Olympics in Helsinki.

“In the end, we got two musk oxen and two walrus cubs, but one of the walruses died on the ship trip near Iceland,” says Pihlström.

Second survived as far as Helsinki: a one and a half meter and 60 kilo walrus, which was named Turso. It was almost a baby, the chicks of that summer 1939.

“Almost certainly its mother had been shot, but this is not being told.”

Also, no information about Turso’s gender has been preserved.

A separate enclosure was built for the cod next to the current Wildlife Hospital in Palosaari. The enclosure extended into the sea, so Turso could swim if he wanted to. However, it was afraid of water and preferred to spend time on land. Maybe it hadn’t learned to swim properly yet.

Little the walrus became attached to its caretakers, who it looked at with its large, round and bright eyes. Cod was sore from tenderness and liked crunches. Turso got herrings to eat: at first five kilos a day, a couple of months later it was already ten kilos.

“The head had to be removed from the herring, otherwise Turso wouldn’t eat them,” says Pihlström.

Audience didn’t have time to see Turso, at least not very many. Turso arrived in Korkeasaari in September 1939, and the shelter was not yet open year-round at that time.

Then the winter war began, and finally there came a dark and stormy night in December 1939. The gates of Turso’s enclosure were broken by the ice that had crashed in the winter storm.

Little Cod slipped into the Baltic Sea and was never seen again.

Swim Cod to freedom, maybe even back home to Greenland?

Hardly, complains Pihlström.

“It didn’t know how to look for food by itself and didn’t even know how to swim properly. The skeleton was never found, but it is probably somewhere at the bottom of the Gulf of Finland.”

So the story of this walrus also ended sadly. On the other hand, maybe it’s better this way.

“During the war, the zoo wouldn’t necessarily have been able to afford to feed an adult walrus,” Pihlström laments.

Even in Korkeasaari The story of the cod walrus is almost forgotten. CEO of Korkeasaari Sanna Hellström briefly replies with a text message from his work trip that he has no information about the case.

However, Nina Trontti, director of animal care and protection, finds an employee who has heard of the Turso walrus.

“This is very old book information from the Second World War. A zookeeper remembered the story from the book. None of the current employees has taken care of the animal in question,” says Trontti.

Trontti reminds us that times were different in 1939.

“The role and practices of zoos have changed completely since that time. Animals are no longer caught from the wild, but on the contrary are released from shelters into the wild.”