East London - For several hours, the community of Winterstrand, Eastern Cape, fought to stop the matriarch whale from leading her pod back onto the rocks and death.
They clapped and made as much noise as possible in an effort to turn the whales from the shore.
By Saturday evening, their efforts had saved three of four beached pilot whales.
The rescue mission began when the whales were discovered on the beach around 8am on Saturday. There were three adults – one an older matriarch a lactating female and a calf.
Barbara Neuper and her family live in Winterstrand, a village just south of East London. She said a friend of hers came across the four whales and called a farmer to bring a tractor and tarpaulins to try to get the whales back into the sea.
Neuper said people covered the whales with towels so that they wouldn’t get sunburnt, pouring water on them to keep them cool.
“We eventually got them into the water, but they came back to beach themselves again. We were asked to make a loud noise and slap the water to scare them and make sure they didn’t come back,” said Neuper.
“It was sad to see, emotional, but an amazing experience. To touch that baby whale, wow.”
Siani Tinley, from the East London Aquarium, and Kevin Cole, from the East London Museum, were the leaders of the rescue effort. The baby whale was around 2m in length, the sub-adults 4m, and the oldest whale was more than 4m.
Cole said the oldest female kept on coming back onto rocks to beach herself, and they suspected there was something wrong with her. Once they got her into the ocean, the other whales followed.
But it wasn’t to be a happy ending for the oldest whale. Cole found her dead, washed up on the beach further down the coast.
“We suspected there was a problem with her,” Cole said. “But the good news is that the lactating female, the other female and the calf have not been seen.”
Cole said a necropsy would be done on the whale to find out if there had been a problem with her that led her to beach herself.
He said that in his 23 years working at the museum, Saturday’s effort to get the whales back into the sea was the biggest rescue attempt he had witnessed.
In the past few years, Cole said, he had noticed an increase in the number of whales beaching themselves along the coastline.
He said scientists believed this might be due to increased pollution in the ocean or seismic activity created in the search for shale gas. - The Star