Inside the response to the biggest whale stranding in almost a century

As the family moved closer, they realised what they had found. Long-finned pilot whales – dozens of them – lay scattered in clumps, stranded along the length of the beach. A huge line of whales – some calves as young as two or three weeks old, some full-grown adults reaching up to seven metres in length.

Pictured: A total of 77 whales were found on the shore (Image: The British Divers Marine Life Rescue)

The Harcus family had to keep walking to find phone signal, heading further round the coast to find a spot that worked, so they could call in to report what they had found – 77 whales in total. Some living, but the majority still, already dead.

The Harcus family had discovered the biggest whale stranding in the UK in almost a century.

It was unclear what had driven the whales into such shallow water and onto the land, with the group all in good condition, and with evidence they had recently been feeding.

Part of the oceanic dolphin family – second only to Orcas in size – pilot whales organise along matrilineal lines. The bodies lay together in family groups, close and in some cases almost on top of each other – suggesting that the whales had experienced a high degree of stress before being stranded, with younger whales trying to get close to leading females in response.

Emma Neave-Webb is the area coordinator for the British Divers Marine Life Rescue, an organisation which works to rescue stranded whales, dolphins and porpoise. She had been working from home, around a mile away, when she got the alert. By the time Alan and his family returned from phoning for help, she was already on the scene.

She told the Herald: “I work in strandings – and I’ve seen videos of mass strandings before – so I knew what it was going to look like, but at the same time, walking up over the dunes and looking out at it, it’s hard to comprehend the scale of it until you are actually there.”

Neave-Webb’s first course of action was to issue an urgent call for support across her own organisation and beyond, with experts from across the UK dropping their day jobs and making their way to Orkney as fast as possible. Then, alongside her husband, who also volunteers for BDMLR, she set about assessing the situation.

Neave-Web said: “I had known we would be up against it, that the chances were very low of saving a single animal, and walking down that was the first thing that hit me – that there wasn’t going to be a chance. We knew very quickly, from experience, that this would be a matter of keeping them as comfortable as possible.”

“We tried to push them upright but they were simply too heavy”, Neave-Webb said. “We couldn’t move them with the resource we had, and the sand is very soft, so they had been sucked in – there was a vacuum – and it was impossible to get them out. We sent video to veterinary experts too, but for the length of time they had been on the beach, and with what they had been exposed to, it would have been a welfare issue if we had attempted to move them back out.”

Pictured: It soon became apparent that none of the whales would survive (Image: The British Divers Marine Life Rescue)

Of the 77 scattered across the beach, only 14 were still alive at that time. The whales had likely been stranded overnight, and so by the time alarm had been raised they had been lying for hours on the land, in the splash of the surf reaching the land, inhaling sand and water. Water would have entered their lungs, meaning rescue was impossible.

And so Neave-Webb and her team set about making them as comfortable as possible until more support could arrive – keeping the whales wet and making sure noise was kept to a minimum. By the end of the day all the whales were dead, and the responders moved on to post-mortems.

James Muir is a beef and sheep farmer based in Burness, a 15-minute tractor ride away from the beach. He responded to an appeal for help on Facebook, using his tractor to help move the whales up the beach, away from the high tide line, to protect the bodies for research.

He said: “We towed them, there was nothing graceful about it, and because it was such a skeleton crew their I actually helped with the post-mortems as well.

“I arrived late morning and it was just after 5 o'clock that I left. The first day I moved five or six [whales], then on the Saturday morning it was 12 or 13, then in the afternoon it was eight or 10. By the Saturday more specialist people arrived on the scene.”

One of those specialists was Mariel ten Doeschate from the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme – a project researching cetacean strandings, as well as seals, marine turtles and basking sharks through the University of Glasgow. She had been meeting with colleagues in Australia – remotely, thankfully – when the call for help came in. Making her apologies, she dropped off the call, quickly gathered equipment, arranged travel from Inverness to Orkney and joined the autopsy.

And while the forensic analysis could provide clues as to the cause of the strandings, it also provides the chance to learn more about pilot whales and the wider environment.

“It’s very sad – a significant loss of biodiversity and a huge loss of life, but it’s also an opportunity to research these animals in a way you can’t really do from live surveys. If you comes across really any type of cetaceans at sea – if you get lucky and take good photographs – you can tell what sort of body condition they are in, or tell them apart, but you often can’t tell the most basic information. Is it male, is it female, is it lactating, is it looking after a calf – you can’t tell that, so everything we think we know comes with uncertainty. So when something like this happens, we don’t just investigate the event and the reasons that cause mass strandings, but also the ecology of the species, which can help those that are still alive.”

Pictured: The Harcus family had discovered the biggest whale stranding in the UK in almost a century (Image: The British Divers Marine Life Rescue)

In this case, according to ten Doeschate, it’s unlikely there was a single cause for the strandings.

“It’s a process of elimination more than investigation. For example, we take samples that look at disease – in case a leader was sick, and the others followed.

“The way they were all piled on top of each other is evidence they were in a state of stress. It’s possible there was something they were responding to – like noise or a predator – but equally we looked at the geography of the bay, and there is only one small segment where it is really deep, so itcould equally be that they came in and stranded on the high tide. In that case they could have come in, and as the tide went out, couldn’t see the exit anymore.”

One way to test whether the strandings could have been caused by noise is to examine the inner ear for damage. “Analysis of the inner ear is really time critical, because the cells are one of the first parts to decompose. We managed to get six, before the window of opportunity closed – so we will look for acoustic damage – but the thing to remember is that acoustic trauma and acoustic disturbance are different things. It is possible a noise disturbed them, and brought a behavioural response, without causing physical trauma.

“That’s why we use a process of elimination – we rule out disease, we rule out a problem with their feeding behaviour, and in some cases the cause becomes obvious, but that’s not the case with this group.”

Another theory is that prey – in this case squid – may have altered their behaviour due to changing conditions in the oceans, forcing the whales to start to hunt in areas of coastline that are new and unfamiliar to them.

She said: “If prey distribution is changing, you can expect the predator response will change as well. If these squid were closer to shore than normal then they would need to navigate around that, and they are normally an off shore species, so they don’t normally need to do that.”

In fact, given its size – pilots more typically live in groups of 10-30 – the pod may not not have been one group, but several – mixing together to breed.

It will take months before more concrete evidence emerges from the samples. So while researchers set about the next stage of their forensic tests, the island community met to discuss what to do with the bodies of the whales.

And with Sanday home to over 700 archaeological sites of importance, as well as nesting birds, otter populations and machair, finding a site for burial presented a challenge. So the community met on the Monday to talk through how they would bury the whales, with scientists, SEPA, representatives from the council and landowners all coming together to try to find a solution.

In the end, due to environmental rules, it was agreed they would be buried in eight graves, with no more 10 whales in each. A site was found – quite a distance from the beach – and the process of preparing the whales for burial began.

For the local community, transporting the whales from the beach marked the start of the end of a frantic and draining few days. Speaking after a week of organising the logistics of the response – “exhausted doesn’t quite cover it” – Neave-Webb said the operation was only possible because of support from the community, with people giving space in their homes, and Orkney Builders providing a digger to help with the burial.

Neave-Webb said: “There’s a wish to mark the occasion somehow – a desire to do something. And the community would like more information so we are organising talks, on pilot whales and the incident, and why we made the decisions we did. We will explain the findings when they are released, so the community can have a better understanding of why it happened, and perhaps prepare if it happens again, because the one thing we do know is that it probably will at some point.”

“It has been completely non-stop. That first day was difficult, when we still had some alive. I’ve been working with cetaceans for 20 years now, and I knew the odds were stacked against them, but I’m not going to lie – it was very difficult, very emotionally challenging. I think it will maybe hit us a bit further down the line, when we’ve had a chance to decompress a bit.

“We’re still dealing with the fallout, but I think in a couple of weeks the plan is that everyone who was there will get together, informally, and just chat, and check everyone is ok. Because it is a big thing, and some of those attending, it was the first stranding they’ve ever responded to. It’s probably the biggest they will ever see, and it’s really difficult.”

Burial was necessarily quick – the bodies were beginning to decompose – but the community has plans for an event to commemorate the stranding, while one body was kept from burial, in order to break down naturally, so the skeleton can be displayed at the heritage centre.

Pictured: Experts from across the UK dropped their day jobs and making their way to Orkney as fast as possible (Image: The British Divers Marine Life Rescue)

And so five days after they left the sea for the last time, the whales were loaded up onto trailers and pulled by tractor across the island, over to large-scale graves, where they were buried two metres deep.

Muir was one of those who assisted, again with his tractor, using it to pull a trailer as an improvised hearse.

“We finally took them for burial on Tuesday – it was getting time critical by then”, Muir says. “There was such a variation in size. The calves really weren’t big, but then you had seven metre long whales. We were concerned about the weight, and fitting them to the trailers.

“I’ve never seen anything of that scale, the number of them. It would have been bad if it was seven pilot whales, but it was just the sheer volume. We tried to keep a bit of chat, because if you started to think about what you were doing it would have pretty quickly become demoralising – 76 dead bodies.

“We tried our best to load them carefully [so they weren’t visible in transport], but I think in some cases it was quite clearly obvious what was being shipped. The island showed a lot of discretion, to turn a blind eye. They were hauled for miles, so someone was always going to see something, but once they were in the trailer we weren’t going to take them back out. The graves were quite some size.”

Colin Headworth and his wife Heather’s home sits right on the edge of the beach where the operation took place – just metres from where the whales were lying. They had been off the island – in Aberdeen – when the whales had stranded, returning home to find a flurry of activity, and dozens of whales, outside their door.

Colin said: “The first thing we did was open up our shed for the researchers, because it has toilet and washing facilities. That had been a big problem for them – they were pretty grateful, and probably upset we hadn’t been there a couple days earlier, so that was one of the biggest contributions we could make.

“There were all these people, working so hard all day, without a toilet. I think it was a particularly big deal for the women, because they kept thanking us.”

By that point the autopsies were well underway, and Colin and Heather – keen amateur photographers – helped photograph and video different pieces of evidence, to share with researchers. A few years ago they helped successfully rescue an Orca that had been stranded in the same bay. This time, with rescue impossible, they watched as the trailers arrived and the whales were loaded in.

Pictured: The whales had likely been stranded overnight (Image: The British Divers Marine Life Rescue)

“When we rescued the Orca, it was an incredible experience – very high adrenaline levels”, Colin said. “It took us a while to come down from that, it was such a lovely creature, and the rescue was successful, which was extraordinary. It was making noise the whole time, lying there, and we were talking to it, saying ‘it’ll be ok, it’ll be ok’. So Heather and I were kind of glad we didn’t experience the whales alive, and to see them dying, because that must have been a horrible, horrible experience. We asked later if they were making noise too, and they said they were making a few clicks and things, but I don’t think it was the same as the Orca. I am not sure what sort of noise they were making – because that noise affects you. If something is lying on the beach crying, it plucks at your heart strings. In a way I am glad I missed it, because that can have a lasting impact on you.

“We’ll see what we can do, to try to remember them, as a commemoration, because it is a big deal. They are beautiful creatures and they should be out in the deep ocean, that’s where they normally live. Way off, deep down, and that’s why they don’t know that much about them. Having them here on land is just sad.

“It all looks a bit like a battlefield now [on the beach] – full of holes and blood. They had sank down into the sand with the water, so we ended up with all these holes. All sorts of birds are coming to scavenge for the bits that are left.

“It’s a neap tide at the moment, so it’s not coming in very far, which was actually really good for the autopsies and for clearing the beach, but it will be a week or so before we get back to the Spring tides. I expect that will clear the beach pretty quick.”