  We study the dynamics of the quantum phase transition of a ferromagnetic
spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate from the polar phase to the broken-axisymmetry
phase by changing magnetic field, and find the spontaneous formation of spinor
domain walls followed by the creation of polar-core spin vortices. We also find
that the spin textures depend very sensitively on the initial noise
distribution, and that an anisotropic and colored initial noise is needed to
reproduce the Berkeley experiment [Sadler et al., Nature 443, 312 (2006)]. The
dynamics of vortex nucleation and the number of created vortices depend also on
the manner in which the magnetic field is changed. We point out an analogy
between the formation of spin vortices from domain walls in a spinor BEC and
that of vortex-antivortex pairs from dark solitons in a scalar BEC.
