The war of the whales
News of a mass whale stranding will see people rushing from all around the country to join a rescue operation. But, where once New Zealand was considered the best at such rescues, now there’s criticism that policy may be getting in the way of saving these serene giants of the sea. reports.
As night fell, one man looked out to the sea off Farewell Spit through concerned eyes. With only the light of the moon as a guide, he furtively led the others across the beach towards the shoreline, where 67 stranded whales lay on death row.
‘‘I was in New Zealand on holiday in 2017,’’ recalls Stephen Whitehouse on a Friday morning in January.
It is shortly after 4am and he speaks from Barrow Island, 100km off the coast of Australia, where he works as a marine officer.
‘‘I called in to a coffee shop. A lady saw the whale on my T-shirt and asked if I was here for the massive whale stranding. I got my coffee and then drove to Farewell Spit with my wife.
‘‘The stranding had been going for three days without success. By the time I got there only 67 whales out of hundreds were still alive.’’
Whitehouse arrived at 10pm to a grim sight.
‘‘The Department of Conservation (DOC) had cleared the beach, and they were out on the mudflats shooting the whales,’’ he says. ‘‘My wife and I walked out to where they were shooting them. They came up and said, ‘what are you doing?’ I said, ‘I am asking you to stop shooting those whales’.’’
Whitehouse told the surprised ranger to call his superior officer and mention his name.
‘‘His superior officer said ‘you better listen to Steve’. But they tried to physically bundle me off the beach. I walked around. They threatened to arrest me. I said, ‘please, I’d love to be in court and expose this’.’’
The war of the whales
At every whale stranding, a rescue war is waged.
Sometimes it boils over into screaming matches on the beach.
‘‘I physically argued with this DOC guy, we were yelling and screaming at each other over the whales. There is a lot of animosity and there have been heated arguments.’’
That night he disobeyed DOC orders and cared for the whales in the moonlight, saving 65 of them.
Whitehouse is the pioneer of whale rescue in New Zealand.
In the late 1970s, as New Zealand’s whale rescue co-ordinator and a fisheries officer, he designed and implemented the Marine Mammal Medic (MMM) course, including full procedure manuals.
It was used to train DOC staff and authorities in effective whale rescue techniques. He later adapted it for laypeople so that more trained volunteers could assist at rescues.
Free courses trained volunteers in whale and dolphin rescue.
He also designed the internationally recognised Whale Rescue Reflotation Pontoon System.
This was inspired by the shock of a rescue experienced at the age of 20. It led to him helping to found rescue charity Project Jonah.
‘‘I helped at a rescue where what they did was try to tie a rope around the whales and pull them back to sea
. . . they pulled so hard they pulled the tail off. They pulled the tails off 30 whales that day,’’ he says.
‘‘I knew there had to be a better way.’’
Now the pontoons are used in 40 countries around the world.
The New Zealand whale rescue coordinator for 25 years, Whitehouse left Project Jonah, disillusioned by the organisation’s direction, in 2000. In 2011, he formed Whale Rescue. ‘‘We formed because we could see that animals were dying because Project Jonah and DOC weren’t doing the correct thing. Our organisation, Whale Rescue, is made up of members who used to belong to Project Jonah who have been disillusioned but who are still there trying to help,’’ he says.
‘‘We do it because we want to help the animals. All of us have been expelled from rescues because we have spoken up that the way they do rescues is wrong.’’
Whitehouse is concerned volunteers with ‘‘beautiful intentions’’ are attending strandings unprepared and whales are dying needlessly.
New Zealand once had the highest success rate in the world for rescuing whales.
‘‘In 2000 it was 98 per cent, now we have dropped to around a 20 per cent success rate. There are lots of reasons why it has dropped but basically it is because DOC don’t allow people to do the right thing and stay overnight, which you need to do,’’ says Whitehouse.
‘‘DoC ultimately has responsibility to respond to strandings. They don’t like criticism . . .
‘‘I am sad about what happens in New Zealand. It is a very political climate in New Zealand. It is really sad, but unfortunately politics rules what happens.’’
Protecting the coastal waters of Banks Peninsula and its inhabitants comes naturally to marine advocate Genevieve Robinson.
She’s dedicated much of the past 10 years to volunteering for numerous projects, associated committees and even training to be a marine mammal medic, with Project Jonah and Whale Rescue.
Speaking up about her concerns about Project Jonah online left Robinson in murky water last month, when she claims she was removed from its callout database.
‘‘Department of Conservation is the first respondent to a stranding, and then Project Jonah coordinates the trained medics. Being removed from the medic database means that I can no longer assist in any PJ-coordinated stranding.’’
Project Jonah chief executive Daren Grover did not respond to questions about Robinson.
Anatomy of a whale rescue
Pilot whales follow their food source. In September and October they are at the top of the east coast of the North Island.
By February, they are in Cook Strait, feeding on squid. The wind and ocean currents push them closer to Farewell Spit, known worldwide as a ‘‘whale trap’’, one of the few places in the world whales go into and lose their sonar.
Farewell Spit is a gently sloping sandy beach known for mass strandings.
The whales’ sonar hits the beach and is reflected upwards, so they don’t get a return echo and, as far as they are concerned, it’s clear ahead.
‘‘Farewell Spit and Cape Cod in America are the top stranding hotspots in the world, identical to each other topographically,’’ says Whitehouse. ‘‘Farewell Spit has deep channels and guts, the tide moves in and out incredibly fast.’’
This week 49 long-finned pilot whales stranded, and were discovered around 10am on Monday.
After restranding on Monday night, the 28 surviving whales were found the next morning and refloated for a second time.
It was hailed as a successful rescue, but was it?
Floppy and the dolphins
On Tuesday, Jo ‘‘Floppy’’ Halliday got up at 5am and left her home in the Bay of Islands, headed to help save whales stranded at Farewell Spit ‘‘for as long as it takes’’.
However, she was stymied by Air New Zealand. ‘‘There was nobody at the counter in Kerikeri, my app wasn’t working and when the gate was opened, 10 or 15 mins later, she wouldn’t take me. I had to come back home.’’
This is the life of a whale rescuer – dropping everything to travel to whales in need at a moment’s notice.
Halliday has also dedicated decades to working with the dolphins of the Bay of Islands.
‘‘The dolphins are almost like my extended family,’’ she says. ‘‘I can identify individuals by sight, I have names for them, I’ve known generations of some families – grandma, mum and baby calf.’’
Last October she marked 30 years as a ‘‘dolphinologist’’ with Fullers GreatSights and says educating people about these beautiful creatures is a passion.
Having attended thousands of whale strandings, she has taught many people the Marine Mammal Medic course that Waterhouse designed.
She joined Whale Rescue because of her passion to help people properly assist stranded whales and dolphins.
On Tuesday she was watching news reports anxiously. ‘‘When you have got people who don’t understand enough about the animals, rescues can go very wrong,’’ she says.
‘‘If they try to refloat them again this afternoon, my fear is that DOC will decide they are going to euthanise them . . . this is their general course of action. Try three times and then finish them off.’’
Our natural instinct is to rush stranded whales back to sea as quickly as possible. But that’s not the right approach and is the reason why whales often restrand, she says.
‘‘Whales need to regain their sense of balance; sometimes the best thing to do is just to keep them wet and wait until they’re ready to move.’’
When a volunteer breaks an ankle, having been smashed by a whale’s powerful tail, she is sympathetic.
‘‘To have people walking around tails and things, it is very hard to control that unless you have the absolute privilege of having medics that have been there and done that before,’’ she says.
When Halliday arrives at a stranding she likes to determine ‘‘who came in first’’.
‘‘The ones clustered around that animal are the more likely to be somebody who may be a matriarchal hierarchy in that group,’’ she explains.
Picking the matriarch or matriarchs is difficult but vital to a successful rescue. ‘‘They have close social connections to the matriarch. That’s the drawcard to get them back out.’’
When the matriarchs have been identified, Halliday puts them into a pontoon system and tows them out to deeper water. The matriarchs are then turned around, to face the remaining stranded whales.
‘‘That way they can communicate with the others. When we release the rest of the animals from the beach they should be drawn to the females out in the pontoon system.
‘‘In years gone by we didn’t worry about rushing for the next tide, it was more about getting the animals comfortable, allowing them to be ready, that’s how it used to work.’’
Identifying a matriarch requires years of skill. ‘‘It’s a hard thing to explain when you know whales are stuck on the ground. If you look at grandma sitting in her rocking chair, she’s not able to get up in a hurry, but she can still give that look of comfort. She’ll still try and say ‘it’s OK, baby, just stay where you are’,’’ says Halliday.
‘‘You’ll see them bobbing around, heads popping out. You’ll often hear them because you’re so close to them, they are all talking to each other. It’s like someone saying is ‘Aunty Jane there? Has anyone seen Aunty Jane? No, but Uncle Bob’s here’ . . . you can almost see them working out who is there, who’s not and what is happening. That is part of their social structure.’’
Pilot whales, like orca, are familyoriented and have a ‘‘tight social structure’’.
Halliday uses an analogy of a house fire to describe the role of Von Economo neurons (VENs), also called spindle neurons, which play a part in whale strandings.
‘‘If you are walking down the road and there’s a house on fire, you don’t know if anyone’s home, so you call 111 and hope like mad no-one is there. You are concerned because that’s your human nature to have some concern,’’ she says.
‘‘However, if it is your house that’s on fire, and you have family members you think might be in there, what’s your first instant reaction? It’s to go in and find if anyone is in there to get them out, that’s your Von Economo neurons at work . . . whales and dolphins have three times more of those neurons than humans.’’
When one animal makes a mistake and comes in too far, ‘‘everybody in the pod is concerned’’.
‘‘If you miss a tide so be it, wait for the next one. The problem with Farewell Spit is the tide changes quickly, if you are not all working at the same time for release you can quickly miss an opportunity.
‘‘It is difficult to keep the animals moving with a tide. You can do it but to do it with people with no experience . . . it is probably not going to work.’’
On the beach
It’s early Wednesday afternoon but for Grover it’s already been a tough week.
‘‘We had some success, and now we are slowly making our way back home,’’ he says.
Project Jonah were notified at 10.30am on Monday of a possible stranding.
‘‘We put out a text alert to our trained volunteers in the Nelson and Tasman region, that’s about 600 people. An hour later there was confirmation 49 whales had stranded at Farewell Spit.
‘‘Where the whales were between low tide and high tide, by around 3pm they had water around them until 6pm,’’ Grover says.
‘‘When we have a mass stranding like this we always release the whales together in one go otherwise . . . if some are left on the beach they will not swim away . . .’’
When whales strand, sometimes on their sides, leaving them vulnerable to drowning, it takes time for them to restore their sense of balance.
‘‘Medics were doing that, working with the whales. The senior team arrived in the afternoon and us two arrived at 4.15pm. We got straight into the water and worked until 8pm and made our way back to base as light was getting dim.
‘‘When the whales were discovered, 11 were already deceased. There were 38 whales at that point. By Tuesday morning we were up ready to go at 5.30am at the stranding base. At 7am we discovered we had 28 live whales, so 10 more had died overnight.
‘‘Our main effort was looking after the 28 live whales and refloating those the next opportunity at high tide at 8am.’’
Volunteers, spread across 4km of beach, worked through the day, forming a human chain to help the whales back to sea.
‘‘We had boats monitoring three or four different pods, split into different groups. We left the whales at last light a couple of kilometres from the beach.’’
Massey University researchers have a permit to tag and microchip pilot whales at Farewell Spit to determine the impacts of reflotation and the fate of rescued individuals.
Karen Stockin, Professor of Marine Biology in the Cetacean Ecology Research Group at Massey, says as part of an agreed project with mana whenua and DOC, researchers applied microchip transponders to whales stranded in Farewell Spit this week.
‘‘If later we find dead whales wash back inshore over coming weeks or months we will know those whales formed part of the original stranding event.
‘‘These tiny microchips (smaller than a grain of rice) are the same as what your pet has put in at the vet, so they can be identified if they get lost.’’
When the whale is scanned with a small handheld scanner by DOC and researchers, it reveals a unique ID code.
On Wednesday from 6am, there were ‘‘no signs’’ of the whales.
Grover says they don’t work at night for safety reasons. ‘‘In particular at Farewell Spit, it’s a remote part of the world. When the sun drops there is no electricity, no lighting, there’s no fresh running water, even at the base. Dead whales attract nocturnal predators. Stingrays are present there all the time and sharks too, of course.
‘‘Having people in the water in dark conditions with stressed wild animals and predators . . . it’s simply too dangerous.’’
The next high tide is the ‘‘optimum time’’ for rescue. ‘‘If that is at night we can’t work around the whales at night . . . as the days progress the chance of the whales surviving does lessen over time,’’ says Grover.
‘‘We like these events to be over sooner rather than later.’’
Internationally recognised orca expert Dr Ingrid Visser disagrees. ‘‘It is fundamental to care for the whales overnight,’’ she says. ‘‘What happens is the tide comes in, whales roll on to their side and drown or the tide comes in and the whales thrash around and injure themselves and others. Whales get compromised in surf conditions . . . broken pectoral fins, other injuries external and internal.’’
Visser says DOC has forced her off the beach at night. When she returns the next morning, some whales are having their eyes ‘‘pecked out by birds while still alive’’.
‘‘It’s a fundamental issue, and it is solvable – they just won’t do it.
‘‘Historically we have done many rescues during the night and never had a problem. It is a thinly veiled excuse and if they truly wanted to help the whales, they’d find a solution.’’
She describes Grover as ‘‘selftaught’’.
‘‘He is well-intentioned but perpetuating the errors when training all the new volunteers,’’ she says.
‘‘The fact inexperienced people are working on these things is a huge problem . . . We had a DOC ranger in charge of a stranding who had never seen a whale before.’’
Whitehouse says DOC has ‘‘banned Ingrid from beaches’’ and describes the way she has been treated as ‘‘disgusting’’.
‘‘Ingrid is a world-renowned expert on orca, virtually no-one else in the world knows as much as she does about orca,’’ he says. ‘‘She is respected by every country in the world, but in New Zealand she’s treated like a leper.’’
Visser recalls an occasion where DOC refused to tell her where a stranded whale was.
‘‘When I got there, there was an area of about the size of a typical living room completely full of blood, and they were about to kill the whale. I said the blood is there because the whale is lying on the oyster bed, and you’re leaving it there. In 15 minutes the water was clear.’’
The ranger thought it had been shot but Visser took one look and saw ‘‘cookie cutter shark bites’’.
‘‘They still wanted to shoot it, but I said ‘no!’ I put it in a pontoon and took it 15km out to sea, and we let it go and it swam off.’’
How to kill a whale
Tesha Winks was with her children on 90 Mile Beach in 2018 when a DOC ranger shot a whale in front of them.
‘‘We turned around, and I remember saying to the kids, ‘it’s OK, there will be a silencer, you won’t hear anything’. But it was really loud. It was horrible to witness.’’
Ian Angus, DOC’s marine species manager, says decisions to euthanise stranded marine mammals are not taken lightly.
‘‘It is a difficult decision to make, and it is only done when absolutely necessary as a humane course of action to end whales’ suffering.’’
Shooting is the preferred method of euthanising stranded seals, whales and dolphins.
Small whales or dolphins up to 2 metres are euthanised by any highpowered rifle and standard sporting rounds. For dolphins and whales of 2m-6m, a high-powered hunting rifle with soft-nosed ammunition is used.
Only people trained specially for large whale euthanasia can euthanise baleen whales, 6m and above, and the Sperm Whale Euthanasia Device is used for sperm whales.
Since 2015, 178 whales have been euthanised by DOC.
It reports to the International Whaling Commission annually for the period of April-March.
‘‘Euthanasia is undertaken by competent staff, experienced in handling the relevant firearm and in possession of a current firearm licence.’’
Halliday recalls one experience where 26 whales were shot.
‘‘I arrived in a helicopter and ended up being too late for that particular lot. The time in between the shots was very long. What broke my heart was these animals, they shot them but left long periods of time in between shooting each one,’’ she says.
‘‘They were side by side; these animals were put through the torture of watching each other die.’’
Returned to the sea
Grover says the dead whales are taken to an area of Farewell Spit with no public access. ‘‘DOC work closely with local iwi and the whales are given a karakia and blessing. Respect is paid to the whales throughout the whole process.’’
Mana whenua Ki Mahua will do a karakia for the whales. ‘‘We have a number of kaumatua involved, we involve our wha¯ nau and our hapu¯ ,’’ says iwi adviser Russell ‘‘Barney’’ Thomas. ‘‘The younger ones come out, we all share that responsibility.’’
Over the last 30 years, and having attended strandings of up to 300 whales, Thomas says the iwi is involved throughout the whole decision-making process ‘‘from start to finish’’. Iwi is the first point of contact when a stranding occurs.
The dead whales were once hauled up above the high tide mark, but are now left in the water, ‘‘the natural way to let nature take its course’’.
‘‘We also have an agreement with Te Papa. If they want a part of the whale they either take the whole whale or nothing. It is always on loan, they don’t have the right to give that whale to anybody else . . .,’’ says Thomas.
‘‘If at some stage they no longer need that whale it will be returned to Golden Bay.’’
Whitehouse has been present for karakia and says it is a beautiful experience but one he wishes happened less often. ‘‘So many whales are being killed needlessly, when it doesn’t need to be that way. New Zealand used to be the best . . . now it just makes me sad.’’