For a week, a young female walrus nicknamed Freya has enchanted Norwegians by basking in the sun of the Oslo fjord, making a splash in the media and bending a few boats.
The 600kg (1,300lb) marine mammal has been named after the Norse goddess of love and beauty. She has already been sighted in the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden and has now chosen to spend part of the summer in Norway.
Freya first gained notoriety in Norway by climbing on to pleasure boats in Kragero, an idyllic southern coastal village, and has been doing the same in the waters of the capital since mid July. The presence of the mammal, which normally lives in the more northerly latitudes of the Arctic, has sparked curiosity among locals and made headlines in the press.
Freya has been filmed chasing a duck and attacking a swan before, more often than not, dozing on boats struggling to support her bulk. A walrus can sleep up to 20 hours a day, and Freya likes to do so on small boats.
“It’s a pity about the material damage but that’s the way it is when you have wild animals,” Rolf Harald Jensen, a fisheries official, told broadcaster TV2, standing next to a hapless inflatable boat buckling under the animal’s weight.
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