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.

World Oceans Day, 8 June 2010. Eulogy for the Gulf of México. Let us now remember and celebrate the life of what was one of the most species diverse and productive corners of the world ocean: the now beleaguered Gulf of México, its brilliance long to be stained by the reality and the legacy of one of the world’s largest ever oil spills.

Supposedly now being contained on the north side of the Gulf, the spill was last compared to the size of Luxembourg but that doesn’t account for the three-dimensional penetration of the mile-plus water column.

The human addiction to oil — and corporate greed shouting out in its willingness to take extraordinary risks for profit —has much to answer for.

Of course, the Gulf itself is not dead. But sadly the world will now think of oily destruction whenever they hear “Gulf of Mexico”. How long it will take the Gulf to get back to “normal”?

For now, the bodies pile up: seabirds, turtles, fish, dolphins. The fishing boats lie rusting in the marinas. The beaches are near empty. And all over the world, the people who trusted the can’t-miss blue chip BP with their pensions and investments, will suffer, too. Even the oil workers on other rigs in the Gulf have been choking on the fumes, and many have been evacuated. Spare a thought for those species that have nowhere to go but to try to live, and sooner or later die, in the mess.

Let us now remember this sea of gold. Please remember the gold was never the oil; it was the fish, shrimp, dolphins, whales, the sea itself. This golden sea will long be tarnished.

Let this at least be a warning to those who may become similarly blinded by the promise of false gold beneath the sea, eager and willing to risk our future, and our children’s future. We can’t let it happen again.

‘They say’, said the reporter carefully, ‘that the age of cheap oil is over’. ‘They’ being a group of invisible and anonymous experts. The sentiment, however, seems to ring true. In order to exploit dwindling oil reserves, the industry is pushing into more extreme environments, for example deeper seas and further offshore, than it would have worked in before. This raises some difficult questions. Does the escalating cost of what may be described as the ‘oil addiction’ of modern societies, now include an increased risk embedded in the deployment of newer technologies in more difficult environments? And with such an increased risk would there not be an inevitability of increased accidents; and, arguably, the deeper a well and the further offshore it is, the more difficult it may be to cap?

The latest horrify and still expanding spill in the Gulf of Mexico points to this, but we should also not forget the recent major spill in Australia where another offshore rig started to leak and also proved very difficult to staunch.

I  noted in February that WDCS continued to be concerned about the apparent self regulation that Sea World is able to exercise in the USA over its own health and safety regime.

We asked why a report, by the California state Department of Industrial Relations' Division of Occupational Safety and Health was released following the attack on a trainer by a killer whale at Sea World Adventure Park in San Diego in 2006 but that criticisms that it contained were retracted after only two days?

Would those criticisms if they had stood maybe have saved a life?