This Young Orca Was Beached On Rocks, But Local Volunteers Came To The Rescue Brilliantly
by N/A, 9 years ago |
3 min read
When being in the right place at the right time saves a life, it's a beautiful thing.
After receiving a call that this young killer whale had been found beached on the north coast of B.C., a dedicated team of whale researchers and local residents spent 8 hours saving its life.
Local residents first noticed the orca when she began to cry for help, after having gotten stuck on some shoreline rocks amidst a sinking low tide.
Experts from the nearby Cetacean Lab and local volunteers sprang into action to free the whale, but quickly realized that trying to move it from the rocks would severely injure it.
Instead, they decided to try and keep her wet and still for 8 hours until high tide, when she could free herself without scraping the rocks.
"At first she was stressed, you could see that her breathing was getting a little faster," Hermann Meuter, co-founder of Cetacean Lab, told CBC.
But after roughly 20 minutes, she began to calm down. "I think she knew that we were there to help her," Meuter said.
And after eight hours of tending to the young orca, water levels became high enough for her to swim away and reunite with her pod, which had been waiting for her in the bay.
"We all cared about this whale and we were just very lucky to give that whale another chance."
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