At 8.13am on Sunday 16 July, Màiri Carrey was wondering how to celebrate her wedding anniversary when her phone buzzed. At that same moment, Lyndsey Dubberley was looking down a steep hillside at the haunting sight of a sole figure – a local crofter – surrounded by 55 dead and dying whales strewn across the beach. “It was eerie to see these beautiful creatures on land when they should be in the sea,” she recalls.
Fighting to save a pod of stranded pilot whales on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides was not in the plans of either woman that day. But Carrey, a trained archaeologist who now works for Bumblebee Conservation Trust, and Dubberley, a former member of the fire service’s water rescue unit, were ready. Both volunteer for British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR), a charity that responds to strandings of whales, dolphins and porpoises across the UK.
After identifying herself to the police and coastguard, Dubberley, who lives a 20-minute drive away, walked down to the beach. It was wet and windy, with shoulder-high white water in the wild sea. “When I got there, I was purely concentrating on what was alive,” Dubberley says. Already, only 15 of the 55 whales were still breathing.
Mass strandings are rare, but happen all over the world. This week, a large pod of pilot whales stranded on a remote beach in Western Australia, while a pod of dolphins died in New Jersey in March. Last year, hundreds of pilot whales were stranded on the Chatham Islands in New Zealand and a pod of sperm whales washed up dead on King Island in Australia.
In the UK, there have been 17,850 stranded cetaceans since 1990, according to the Zoological Society of London’s Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme.
Sometimes it happens for natural reasons such as old age or illness; other times, it is due to human activities including overfishing, naval sonar or pollution. The strong social bonds of pilot whales make them particularly susceptible to mass stranding because the entire pod will often follow a whale in trouble. The Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS) is still investigating the cause of the Isle of Lewis incident, but as one of the whales “appeared to have a vaginal prolapse”, there are suspicions that the stranding could have been due to one female giving birth.
Both Carrey and Dubberley have trained to respond to mass strandings in simulations, using lifesize, weighted whale models. The success rate can be encouraging: according to 2021 data from the BDMLR, of the cetaceans that stranded alive and needed help, 79% were refloated, 8% were euthanised and 13% died during response.
But the Lewis stranding was particularly challenging. It was one of Scotland’s largest recorded strandings and conditions were not in their favour – the beach was remote, the sea was fierce and high tide was not due until 7pm.
The initial task for responders to any mass stranding is to give first aid to the animals, and to keep them cool, wet and shaded until a vet has confirmed whether they are healthy enough, and conditions are safe enough, to attempt to refloat them. This can also depend on how far they are from the sea and whether pontoons are available to help lift the animals.
Dubberley and the team followed their training, keeping the whales wet while being careful not to get water in their blowholes. They got them upright and stable, dug trenches under their fins, and covered them with damp sheets to protect their delicate skin from the sun.
The nearby Traigh Mhòr pony trekking centre brought sheets, towels, buckets and spades to channel ocean water through the sand.
The smaller whales were attended to first. Adult pilot whales can grow to about six metres and weigh up to 2,300kg, so more help was needed before the volunteers could attempt to move them. “Your instinct is to help but, physically, we just couldn’t,” Dubberley says.
Carrey arrived two hours after Dubberley from her home on the Isle of Harris, and immediately began caring for three whales. It was exhausting work, going back and forth to the sea with buckets of water and pouring them over the whales – the tide slipping further away as the hours ticked by.
It was dangerous, too. Volunteers wear PPE to protect from the bacteria that whales can carry, and their huge tails can do serious damage when they suddenly start thrashing in distress.
At times, Carrey’s whales were so still she wondered if they had died. Then they would take a sudden, deep breath and become animated again.
Throughout the day, medics updated BDMLR head office, which was trying to fly in equipment – such as pontoons to help with refloatation – from all over the country. But the remote beach is a communications blackspot. “One policeman was running up to the top of the hill for me to get a message out,” says Dubberley.
With the tide receding, the volunteers tried to refloat two whales that were closer to the water. “One had swum off and not come back,” says Carrey, but the second one, a calf, “kept coming back in”, perhaps drawn to its mother on the beach. Despite several attempts to get it back out to sea, the calf couldn’t be saved.
By lunchtime, only eight adults and four calves were alive. Carrey’s whales were in a bad way: their flippers were injured from struggling, and the weight of their bodies, no longer supported by the water, was starting to crush their organs.
Around 3.45pm, the harrowing decision was made on welfare grounds to stand down the rescue operation and euthanise the remaining whales. “It wasn’t the outcome anybody wanted but we tried as hard as we could,” says Carrey.
The coastguard used a privacy barrier to shield the whales’ final moments from TV crews.
For Dubberley, the ending is “all a bit fuzzy”. She recalls: “I just thought, ‘I don’t want to hear the gunshots.’ I knew that would stay with me for ever.” She said goodbye to the whales and left, covering her ears as she walked up the hill.
Both women remain committed to volunteering. Back home, Carrey went for a beach walk to clear her head, only to find the corpse of a seal. As her training dictates, she took photographs and reported it to the SMASS.
• Melissa Hobson is a trained BDMLR volunteer
• This article was amended on 31 July 2023 to clarify that the stranding was not Scotland’s largest.
