A second dead dolphin sighting has been reported on the same stretch of coastline in two weeks, just a mile's walk from where the last was found. Bartosz Fedkowicz, who lives in Boston, Lincolnshire, had walked to the marsh at Butterwick to take photos of the sunrise on Friday, August 26.
A few minutes before 6am, as he was getting set up, he noticed the rotting animal next to what appeared to be a log of driftwood, Lincolnshire Live reports. "At first, I didn't know what it was," he said.
"I would never suppose that such animals live in the North Sea." Upon seeing the dead dolphin, which had decomposed to a state where its jaw bone had become visible, Mr Fedkowicz said: "I felt sorry for this animal."
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He estimated the aquatic mammal was laying inland 'about 100 yards' (around 450 metres) from the shoreline. "I think the higher tide will take him," he added.
Eight days prior to Mr Fedkowicz's discovery, a holidaymaker stumbled upon a similar scene about a mile-and-a-half away in Freiston. Raquel Trotter's daughter had found a dead dolphin on the marsh, laying next to two dead seals, a deal seal pup and several dead sea birds.
"The first dolphin I've ever seen in the wild was dead and a mile-and-a-half away from the ocean," she said. At the time, a spokesperson for the Wildlife Trust said that while it made for a strange sight, the dead seals washing up wasn't too uncommon.
However, the dolphin was a "significant find". "No obvious injuries can be seen on the photo and it's also likely to have died out to sea and been washed up," she said previously.
WARNING: DEAD DOLPHIN PICTURED BELOW
"It is very upsetting to see these animals in this way and we do abreast of such reports so that we can respond if we are seeing unusual levels of mortality." Some mystery surrounds Mr Fedkowicz's discovery, with the trust not being able to completely confirm if it was a different dolphin to the one Mrs Trotter found.
There is the possibility that the same dolphin got picked back up on a tide and then washed up again further along the coastline by another high tide. "Unfortunately, dead seals and dolphins do occasionally get washed onshore, particularly on high tides," the spokesperson previously said.
The seal in Mr Trotter's picture was "long dead," she added, and had probably been floating offshore for some weeks until it washed up onshore on a high tide. According to Wildlife Trust guidance, such discoveries should be reported to the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme, which has monitored the strandings of dolphins, whales, porpoises, marine turtles and basking sharks on the UK coastlines since 1990.
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