Jacob Borgdorff explores the carcass of a roughly 13 metre-long humpback whale on the floor of the Stewiacke River during low-tide in Stewiacke, N.S. on July 5. A highly unusual site, the whale spotted earlier in the week while trapped on a sandbar before it died despite efforts by locals who tried to free the animal.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
It was low tide as Morgan MacDonald splashed a bucket of seawater over the humpback whale in the middle of Nova Scotia’s Shubenacadie River on Canada Day. The whale’s grapefruit-sized eyes tracked the handful of people desperately trying to keep him cool, plastering his black barnacled body with wet blankets. Periodically, he opened his long mouth and blew a prehistoric-sounding trumpet of air.
Soon the tide, a wall of fast-moving water that surges up from the Bay of Fundy twice daily, enveloped the dark creature. The whale swam into the rising muddy waters, its human saviours left hoping it would find its way way out.
Sadly, the next day, the school-bus-sized humpback turned up dead on the muddy banks of the river. Since then, its carcass has been pushed and pulled through the local rivers that carve into the countryside, an eye-popping scene for motorists travelling on a busy highway and a growing attraction for people to venture out onto the mudflats at low tide for a smelly close-up.
“Ugh,” coughed 10-year-old Emma Speelman of Stratford, Ont., pulling her T-shirt over her nose as she caught her first whiff of the whale, which was oozing liquid on Friday morning. “It’s salty and kind of like something went bad and molded.”
The whale vocalizing and having water splashed on it on the Shubenacadie River on July 1. Video courtesy Morgan MacDonald.
The Globe and Mail
Erin Densmore of the nearby dairy farming town of Stewiacke also waded onto the red mud flats with her three daughters to see the whale.
“It’s just pretty weird,” she said, as she warned her children to stop playing in the liquid pooling around the whale.
“I can’t believe he made it this far. But we get huge tides. Our tides are so so so strong.”
The Bay of Fundy is home to the highest tides in the world, which can rise and fall at their most extreme up to 11 metres.
All Friday morning, a steady stream of children and adults waded in their bare feet onto the mud to see the whale in the flesh until a local man who takes care of a nearby park called out a warning to come back to shore: When the tide turns and the water starts rushing in, the mud can bottom out, Bruce Turner later explained. “Down you go,” he said, describing how the mud can suck a person in.
Just why exactly a humpback whale, a common sight in the Bay of Fundy, would make his way 35 kilometres up a river into the centre of the province is a question many are asking. It’s not uncommon to see smaller marine mammals such as porpoises and seals in the river. Just last month, a minke whale was spotted in the waters. And a few years ago, a massive leatherback turtle found his way up the river and was rescued by helicopter. But the presence of a humpback whale is a mystery the Marine Animal Response Society was hoping to solve by recovering its remains and doing a necropsy.
In his 23 years of guiding people on rafts onto the river to ride the tidal bore, this was the first time Mr. MacDonald ever encountered a humpback whale, though he’s spotted dolphins and seals, which usually take a day or two to figure out how to get back to sea. “A large mammal like that, when you see it alive one day and dead the next, it’s sad,” said Mr. MacDonald, the owner of Fundy Tidal Bore Adventures.
Unfortunately, the logistics of removing the whale from an area hammered by the highest tides in the world and surrounded by treacherous mud is too dangerous, said Tonya Wimmer, executive director of the marine mammal rescue and conservation non-profit. Now, she adds, it’s already started to decompose – past the time when it could be fruitfully studied.
“We can only speculate in terms of why it ended up alive where it did and got stranded. The usual theories are that it followed fish in and just got caught in the tide after it went out,” she said.
As for why it died after it appeared to swim away, Ms. Wimmer said often stranded marine mammals die from trauma and the strain of their enormous mass lying on the ground as opposed to being in water, which can weaken and further disorient the animal.
“It’s an unfortunate situation in terms of the animal itself and what we were hoping to learn, but this happens. We often get reports of animals in really weird or inaccessible locations and it really breaks our heart not to be able to do more, but it’s also about human safety,” she said.
At least for now, the whale is being left to drift and decompose. Nova Scotia’s Department of Natural Resources and Renewables spokesperson Adèle Poirier said it’s aware and monitoring the location of the dead humpback whale, but it is leaving it in the hands of the Marine Animal Response Society.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada had assisted in locating the whale with land and air patrols, spokesperson Debbie Buott-Matheson said, but is now also standing down unless it is asked for more help.