A remote village on the north-west coast of Alaska has begun a reverse tourism campaign - residents want visitors to stay away.

Pacific walruses by the thousand have come ashore in early autumn near the Inupiat village of Point Lay in recent years, including about 6,000 last week, and people have dropped in, hoping to see a phenomenon brought on by climate change and disappearing summer ice in the Chukchi Sea.

However, Point Lay, which has a population of 270, has no hotel or restaurants. And, to residents, walruses are a major food source, not a curiosity. Disturbances by boats or aircraft can spook the animals into stampedes which crush the smallest ones.

So Point Lay is working with the US Fish and Wildlife Service on an information campaign: Thanks for the interest, but please don't stop by.

"They've had people come and had no place to accommodate them and they ended up having to tell the person to get back on the plane and head out," said Andrea Medeiros, spokeswoman for the agency in Anchorage. "I would imagine it's a very awkward situation for them."

The walruses cannot even be seen from the village.

"You have to travel across a cove to get to where the animals are," Ms Medeiros said. Visitors would need to be driven by a resident and the trip can be hazardous.

"They're actually on a barrier island," she said.

Walruses started coming ashore on the north-west Alaska coast in 2007. In September last year, 35,000 packed a rocky beach near Point Lay. The carcasses of more than 130 mostly young walruses were counted after a stampede in September 2009 at Icy Cape.

Walruses prefer spreading out on sea ice, where they can monitor the approach of predators such as polar bears.

Many adult male walruses stay south of the Bering Strait all year round. However, females with calves stay on the edge of pack ice, where the young can rest as mothers dive for clams.

As the sea ice melts, the edge moves north, providing a moving platform over the shallow Bering and Chukchi seas.

In recent years, as Arctic temperatures have warmed, the edge of the sea ice has receded far to the north over water too deep for the walruses to dive and reach the ocean bottom. They have the choice of resting on ice over deep water or moving to shore, joined by thousands of other animals.

Remnant ice floating in the Chukchi gave the walruses a safe platform this year until last Friday, when about 6,000 of them went ashore near Point Lay. They appear to have since moved on, probably to Russia, Joel Garlich-Miller, a walrus biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Point Lay Tribal Council president Leo Ferreira, in an interview with Sitka radio station KCAW last year, urged the media to keep its distance and reacted angrily when a photographer flew near the walruses. He issued a statement on Friday reiterating a "no media" policy while the mammals are on shore.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service works with the Federal Aviation Administration to discourage planes from flying near the animals.

The agency also has received a two-year, 140,000 US dollars (£114,000) grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to help Point Lay.

The grant will pay to train young people from the area in photography, videography and film production which could be used on a website about walruses going ashore. The goal is to keep people informed while warning them of the hazards and discouraging them from visiting.

The grant also will pay for villagers to monitor walrus coming ashore over about 50 miles (80km) of ocean beach, and to collect data including the age, sex and cause of any walrus deaths.

Walrus herds are just one change brought to Point Lay by climate change. The frozen ground on which the village is built is melting. Over the summer, soil weakened ground between a river and the lake where Point Lay drew water. A canal developed and drained the lake. The community has water in storage tanks that should last about a year, giving residents time to find a new water source.

Point Lay residents are trying to adapt.

"It's challenging," Ms Medeiros said.

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