As I mentioned, I recently started volunteering for the Marine Strandings Network. And I was on a local peninsula called Start Point checking on the welfare of a white coat seal pup, actually when the call came through that there was a newly dead dolphin on a beach nearby.
And I went down and I mean, I’ve seen dead dolphins before, really decomposed ones, but this dolphin was the most beautiful thing I think I’ve ever seen and in some ways the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.
So I was able, with some help of members of the public, to recover her body for post mortem. We brought her up the beach and I never want to touch a common dolphin again. But, I will as a marine recorder.
And I just looked at her and she was so freshly killed and she was killed by a gill net, which is a very fine net that was close into shore, so she hadn’t, hadn’t died very long ago, so she still had everything intact. There was no scavenge marks, she had eyes. And I had to keep checking that she was actually dead because she just looked so vibrant and she was lactating.
So that broke my heart. And the colours on her tail, dolphins, these dolphins are supposed to be black, yellow and white, but she was blue and she was gray and she looked like she’d been painted. She was so beautiful.
And it was a really windy, stormy day on the beach. So there were only three people there. And a couple came up and they said, you know what, • what’s happened? And I said, this is prior to having it confirmed by the pathologist, but I said, it may be that she was caught in a fishing net. I need to wait for confirmation. And, their eyes filled with tears because her presence was still so powerful. And we all had a moment and they apologized to her kind of on behalf of the human nation, to the dolphin nation. And I asked them, I research dolphins, I’ve got this photo ID I’m doing. Anybody who finds a dolphin, I invite them to name the dolphin. Would you like to name her. And they looked at each other and they said she’s called Tye. I didn’t ask why.
They were just very moved. And so Tye’s body was recovered for postmortem. Tye then, findings about her were then reported to the government. And then when I went to a United nations meeting, an ASCOBANS meeting of the Common Dolphin Group, the head of the cetacean stranding investigation program, put up a slide, put up my photo of Tye.
So I really felt that in that moment it was profoundly moving and painful. It impacted somebody else, which is, although they were sad, I wouldn’t wish that on them. But that’s what my work is about. It’s getting this care for them. She then went to policy leveland that’s everything right there.
That encounter was a microcosm of everything I hope to achieve. And I think about her a lot.
-Sarah
This post was adapted from a voice recording in episode 90 of the Whale Tales Podcast, listen here
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