Whale beaching baffles experts
farewell spit (New Zealand) — Whale rescuers were cautiously optimistic on Sunday that the current wave of mass beachings in New Zealand was over, after hundreds of the creatures died after being stranded ashore.
The crisis began early on Friday when a pod of 416 whales were found stranded on the 26-kilometre Farewell Spit, with hundreds more following them over the weekend.
The mysterious stranding of the whales has baffled scientists and environmentalists.
As low tide approached early Sunday evening, around 300 pilot whales were heading out of Golden Bay in the northwest of the South Island and swimming towards the deep-water safety of Cook Strait.
“It’s good news. The pod is swimming well away,” Department of Conservation regional conservation manager Andrew Lamason said.
“They’re the exact words,” he added, when asked if he was cautiously optimistic the crisis was over. “We’ve pulled our boats out of the water.”
The news came as a relief for the hundreds of exhausted volunteers, who had spent three days comforting the stranded animals and keeping them cool while waiting to refloat them on the high tide.
Late Saturday afternoon, when rescuers believed the situation to be under control, about 240 whales moved around a small flotilla of boats.
They beached themselves about three kilometres from the Friday stranding.
The first group of more than 400 beached whales was found early Friday, with many of them already dead.
“You could hear the sounds of splashing, of blowholes being cleared, of sighing,” said Cheree Morrison, a magazine writer and editor who first stumbled upon the whales. “The young ones were the worst. Crying is the only way to describe it.”
On Saturday, whale rescuers linked arms in neck-deep water to try and prevent about 200 pilot whales from stranding themselves again in a remote bay, where 300 of the animals died this week.
By mid-afternoon, the whales had moved offshore and were being monitored by boat as the tide dropped.
By Sunday morning most had managed to refloat themselves and at high tide volunteer workers were able to get the remaining animals back into the water where boats were used to guide them towards the other survivors.
Many volunteers gathered on the shoreline broke down in tears on hearing the latest strandings appeared to be over.
Since a conservation worker spotted the whales washed ashore, rescuers have spent two days pouring water over the beached whales to try and keep them cool, while waiting to catch high tides to carry them out to sea again.
School children have sung to soothe the distressed animals.
The scale of the latest event “was a shock,” even for a country with the most whale strandings in the world, said Darren Grover of Project Jonah, a marine environmental group. The precise cause of the stranding was not known, though beached whales are not an uncommon sight at Golden Bay. Its shallow muddy waters confuse the marine mammals’ sonar, leaving them vulnerable to stranding by an ebb tide, according to Project Jonah.
Farewell Spit, a sliver of sand that arches like a hook into the Tasman Sea, has been the site of previous mass strandings. — AFP, Reuters, AP