WDC Blog - From the Front Line

By Elsa Panciroli

With photographs by Charlie Phillips

I’d just finished my lunch when I got the call from my local BDMLR coordinator, Linda Nicholson, “it’s on.” She’d messaged to warn there’d been a mass stranding and I should stay by the phone. I’d spent the last 20 minutes manically gulping food and going over the action plan: call my boss, close-up, get fuel, go home, put together a grab bag, check the location - and drive.

It’s a stunningly beautiful 3 hour journey from Inverness where I run the WDCS Dolphin and Seal Centre with my colleague Kila, to Sarsgrum near Durness, in the far-flung north-westerly corner of the UK. I found myself see-sawing between excitement and dread. On the one hand I was going to see my first long-finned pilot whales: I’d be able to touch them, hear them and examine their beautiful bodies. On the other hand, was this really how I wanted to see my first: suffering as they lay crushed by their own weight on the cold sand?

At 6:15pm, I was the second WDCS worker on the scene after Field Officer Charlie Phillips, and far from the first person - let alone the first marine mammal medic - to get to Sarsgrum. The Kyle of Durness is a snaking bay just next door to Cape Wrath. It is narrow, shallow and riddled with mud and fine sand banks - a cetacean’s worst nightmare.
The police, Coastguard and BDMLR were visibly present, their cars lining the edge of the single-track road in a lopsided conga above the shore. There were 4 pilot whales at Sarsgrum: a mother and calf, an adult about 20 metres from them, and another adult on a bank in the middle of the bay, separated from the shore by waist deep water. As we are taught in training, I kitted up and made straight for the highest ranking BDMLR medic.

Tracey Meiklejohn, Coordinator for Caithness, filled me in on events so far. Around noon 50-60 pilot whales had been seen in the bay when the tide was in. Even at full water it was dangerously shallow. The Navy bomb disposal team, who operate off the cape, had used their boats to corral most of them out of the danger zone and seawards, but the four at Sarsgrum had beached despite their best efforts. We had to keep them alive and comfortable and wait for the tide, which was in 6 hours. Their chances of survival were quite slim.

I approached my first live pilot whale with my heart in my throat. It looked more like the models we trained on than a living creature. It proved itself conscious with explosive exhalations, its blowhole opening from a half moon slit to a fist-size gape and then swiftly pulling shut. At 4-5 breaths per minute it was in the normal range for a beached pilot. I went to the mother and calf and offered to take over from those who had been keeping them wet and monitored since they’d beached hours before.

The mother was 5-6 metres long, her calf 3-4 metres. They lay side by side, the calf squealing constantly in distress. Its mother listed terribly to her left, despite all efforts to upright her, and she occasionally thrashed in an effort to get closer to her youngster. They were draped in sheets, kept wet by three diligent members of the public. I sat myself beside the calf and began gently caressing him and cooing, hoping to calm him. He couldn’t have been more than 2 years old, still suckling.

What struck me was their eyes: they look right into you. Adrift on the land like this, whales are useless lumps of flopping fat, but you can see the intelligence and distress in their eyes. In the water these creatures have majesty and agilty, but out of their element they are crushed by gravity, prisoners in their own bodies and helpless.

It was decided to move the calf - a male - so the mother could see it more easily. She was distressed by the process, but calmed afterwards. The youngster continued to squeal. It was at this point we got the terrible news from BDMLR medic Jamie Dyer about the rest of the whales. While 20 of them had made it out of the Kyle to the open sea, the remaining animals had tragically beached on a sandbank out of sight of Sarsgrum. “It’s carnage out there,” he warned us, “only come if you have a dry suit and a strong stomach.”

At this point several of my colleagues from the WDCS Spey Bay centre arrived, so WDCS Conservation Officer Alison Lomax and I struggled into our drysuits and boarded the Coastguard and Navy ribs along with 30 others including medics and brave members of the public. As we were ferried through the shallow channel to the whales, Jamie Dyer explained that the animals were upside down, on top of one another, some being sick and others bleeding. “There are some already dead - you just have to put them out of your mind for now, try not to dwell. Our priority is to save those who are still alive and have the best chance of survival.”

We braced ourselves for the worst.

Some kind of safety valve shuts off your emotions in situations like this. Although the scene was terrible, we took a collective deep breath and went straight to work. Jumping into the shin deep water we split into two teams, moving from whale to whale, often stepping over dead ones to reach those still desperately trying to keep breathing. The noise was incredible, as every animals puffed, thrashed, squealed and screamed to each other. After digging into the sand under the belly side, we pushed each whale upright. One person stayed behind to brace the animal and stop it from tilting back onto its side, and the team moved on to the next. It went on like this until every living pilot whale was upright with its blowhole free of water and sand.

Many of the usual rules didn’t apply: pontoons and such equipment couldn’t be deployed effectively as the water got steadily deeper, and with the animals piled on top of one another it was impossible to avoid their powerful flukes. We had to watch out for one another and ourselves.

Soon the water was up to our thighs and we were able to help the smaller whales and juveniles off the sandbar. We did this in groups where possible, but again and again they came back towards their distressed friends. Some of us wrangled them away from the sand while others pushed and tugged more whales out to safety. Soon the group of swimming pilot whales had grown to around 15 animals, all huddling together and calling frantically.

It was an exhausting final effort to get the last and largest individuals out to join them. Two in particular refused to leave without each other. When we tried to push one, it would hear the other calling and turn back. In the end we had to push them nearer each other before both consented to be shoved off the sandbar. Meanwhile the bodies of those who didn’t make it were covered over and soon disappeared, including a calf no more than a couple of months, perhaps 2 metres long, its neonatal folds still clearly visible. It had died before we could get there.

The tide raced into the bay, and soon the ribs were pulling us out of the water. Alison and I, being tall, remained as long as physically possible, gently but forcefully pushing the pilot whales in the right direction and keeping them together. Soon we were close to being swept off our feet and the ribs retrieved us too. Only 4 or 5 people with flippers stayed to keep driving the group out to the sea and safety. We felt a mix of elation and worry as we watched them recede into the distance.
It was close to 11pm when we reached shore again. It had taken over 4 hours of punishing physical effort, but we’d achieved something fantastic: every whale that was alive when we got there had been refloated. Alison was cold and my drysuit had leaked badly. Thoughtful locals had come with hot drinks and snacks. We refuelled, changed our clothes and returned to Sarsgrum. We gave our drysuits to our WDCS colleagues and let them continue the fight to save the remaining 4 whales at Sarsgrum.

Alison and I were completely exhausted - it was over for us. Our thoughtful and resourceful boss, Centre’s manager Alice Mayne, had booked all of us into a hostel, where we collapsed into fitful sleep. Our team members kept the last whales alive and refloated them after 1am.

I woke at 4am and went to rejoin those still at Sarsgrum. Charlie Phillips and I had been keeping one another updated, and he was now out on the headland watching to make sure none of the animals were coming back. He told me at least 8 of the whales had restranded in the night, but only 4 were still alive. The other bodies may have been some of those already dead on the sandbar, but the 4 who were alive were likely to have been the ones that had been refloated late that night. One was a calf.

They were sinking into the mud, and it was a distressing couple of hours before a vet could reach them through the dangerous terrain and assess them. All were humanely euthanized. We breathed a sigh of relief that their suffering was over.

Our thoughts have to remain with the survivors. It’s a horrible event, and every death is sad and painful, but of 50-60 animals more than half, 40+ of them made it back to the sea. This is a fantastic success. Everyone worked tirelessly, despite the cold, lack of sleep and difficult conditions. I for one think exhaustion and aching muscles are worth it to rescue such beautiful, special creatures.

If it wasn’t for our efforts, most - if not all - would have perished.

It will be months before any of us will close their eyes without seeing pilot whales in their dreams.

Just before Ebenezer Scrooge is left by the jovial Ghost of Christmas Present, he notices that the spirit had something hidden in the skirts of his festive robe. Perhaps unwisely he asks what it is and the ghost moves his robe to reveal two child-like but nonetheless fiendish figures. He names the girl as ‘Want’ and the boy ‘Ignorance’.

‘Are they yours?’ says Scrooge but the ghost replies ‘They are man’s!’

‘A Christmas Carole’ is Charles Dicken’s fantasy morality tale and Scrooge is given a chance to redeem himself. He becomes a better man and Tiny Tim, the crippled son of his long suffering clerk, Bob Crachit, is also given a reprieve. He will live, thanks to the new generosity of the reformed miser.

'Man', as Dicken’s called us (or humankind as we might prefer now), is at a cross roads. We can let Ignorance and Want continue to guide us (and perhaps ‘Greed’ would be a better modern word for Want), or we can wake-up to the seriousness and stupidity of our current situation and act. The time-line is brief. In fact, the wake-up and the action need to come this very next week and Copenhagen – the United Nations 15^th Climate Change Conference – is the place.

As the media goes into frenzy over this crucial meeting of the world’s nations, there will be many confusing and conflicting reports of both the issue and the meeting. As I write, the news in the UK is already dominated by a story that some scientists have allegedly misrepresented some of the key evidence about climate change. This will add wind to the argument preferred by many that human-driven climate change is neither true nor dangerous (despite all the evidence to the contrary).

To be frank I much prefer this argument too. It makes me feel a lot happier. It let’s me hope that all I hold dear, my family and friends, the whales, the dolphins, and much more besides, is going to be fine.

Sadly it is not true. And this story of misuse of evidence may even obscure what will happen in Copehagen.

I have followed the climate change issue for many years. I first wrote about the threat of climate change to cetaceans when we were still dealing in broad theories. However, I felt then that the risk for them (and us) then was too great to continue in our 'kamikaze mission’ to over-exploit the world’s resources, irrationally expand our populations, and pump climate-changing gases into the atmosphere. But I also thought at that time (some twenty years ago) that this was a slow process. I thought it was going to be more a threat to future generations. The news, however, is that things are happening fast; more than swiftly enough to threaten the current human generations as well as those yet to come.

I have no doubt that climate is changing. No doubt that we are to blame and no doubt that this is the most serious threat to all living things. Not everything is perfectly worked out yet, no one is saying this (although predictive powers are improving) and please don’t be confused with descriptions of previous periods of global warming and cooling. That’s all true, but what we are now facing is unprecedented. (This is rather like the argument that species have always gone extinct in the past and it is a perfectly natural process; also true but again the current rate of extinctions is outside any natural range and it too is human-driven.)

Dickens was a kind man. He gave the eponymous miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, a second chance and, in this fine fiction, the old man understood and acted. We are in that same position but this is no fiction. Some suggest we need to stabilize climate gases by 2015 – only five years away - and this will clearly require a major re-think in the way that we all live. The emissions of climate changing gases have to be reduced not just by a few percent, they have to be radically curtailed and this is going to cause real pain in the developed nations.

The signs for the Copehagen meeting are not good. It seems unlikely that the major polluters will agree to something that significantly handicaps their economies. However the US is now taking part at the highest level and that’s an enormous change of approach from their position in recent years.

WDCS will not be at the meeting in Copenhagen, but we will be watching closely like many others. We know how big meetings works and we will be willing the negotiators to make real progress; and willing our species to renounce the Ignorance and Greed that we have been shackled to for too long. If you want to read more about the issue click here. The Copenhagen conference also has its own website here.

Mark Simmonds, WDCS International Director of Science