the dolphin in my arms
responding to a mass stranding event in Orkney
Dear reader, while our rescue was mostly a success, I tell this story exactly as it happened and there are distressing details. Please read/listen with care x
It takes me nearly ten minutes to get to her. She is almost a kilometre away from the rest, beached on the sand right on the other side of the bay. I jog across pebbles, wade through a river, climb mounds of kelp, to reach her. I hate that she is alone.
A seasoned stranding responder has told me what to do when I get to her: dig sand out from beneath her pectoral fins; protect her skin with a wet sheet; pour water over her back to keep her comfortable; keep her dorsal fin and blowhole clear (the former for temperature regulation, the latter for breathing); monitor her for signs of deterioration, and stay with her until BDMLR (British Divers Marine Life Rescue) medics arrive.
But, the very first thing I do is speak.
I learnt this from working with nesting jackdaws—to speak in soft, low tones as you go about your work so they know you are there, so you do not surprise them. And I remember, a long time ago, reading something about how this is important for cetaceans (whales and dolphins), too—how when they strand it is good to move slowly and calmly and to speak quietly and gently. I don’t know if this is backed up by research, but it is intuitive, isn’t it? They are sentient, intelligent, emotional beings1. They may well sense panic. They may well sense a lack of care. And so as I approach her I am saying, in a gentle, quiet voice, hello, I’m here to help, we’re going to do our best for you, I promise, we’re going to figure this out.
There are six altogether. Six common dolphins. One adult male, three adult females, and two female calves (one of whom is less than a month old), all of them stranded here on this shallow, sandy bay.
These bays are notorious for cetacean strandings. Without any solid edges—just gentle, sandy slopes—it is thought that the dolphins’ sonar (which they use to build a map of their environment) does not echo back to them clearly. This makes it difficult for them to map the area, and so they can swim right into the shallows, unaware that they are heading into a trap.2
The first thing I notice as I get closer to the dolphin is her size. At around six feet long, she is bigger than the five on the other side of the bay. And then I notice something else, something concerning: there is blood coming from her blowhole, dribbling down her head. None of the other dolphins were bleeding like this. I kneel about a metre from her and listen to her breathing. One powerful, gasping breath erupts from her blowhole every four seconds. This is very fast. I tell her, soft and low: it’s okay, you’re okay.
She knows I am here, is looking at me with her eye—wide, treacle brown—and she is trying to move her fluke up and down. I think this is probably a sign of stress, as if she wants to move away from me, and I don’t want to stress her more but I do want to move her into a comfortable position, and so, slowly, slowly, I come closer to her, speak softly as I do, say over and over that I am here to help.
For safety, I have a face mask and plastic gloves on. I wish I could take them off so I do not appear so alien, so she could feel the touch of warm skin rather than cold plastic, but dolphins carry diseases that can spread to humans—especially through water droplets in their breath—and so I keep the protective gear on as I work.
The first thing I do is dig her pectoral fins out of the sand, move them into a better position, rock her just slightly so that her body is upright. She is heavy. So heavy. And then I ferry water back and forth to her body, let it slip over her skin, say again and again, we’re going to do our best for you. And every four seconds that huge, powerful gasp comes erupting from her blowhole. I can see it open and close, open and close, want to wipe the clotted blood away from its edges but do not want to cause her pain and so I don’t, I just keep ferrying water to her drying skin and whisper gentle nothings to her.
We think the pod stranded in the night, which would mean they’ve been here at least six hours. Stranded dolphins face many dangers, the primary one is the weight of their own bodies—without water to support them, they collapse in on themselves, their organs slowly crushed. Birds pose a grave danger too. Crows and ravens may pluck the eyes from still-living and entirely defenceless cetaceans. Thankfully, human presence largely stops the latter risk, but only the return of the ocean, the cradle of the water, can fix the former.
As luck would have it, the tide is turning. It is swishing into the channels I’ve dug around her, hopefully taking some weight off her organs. But damage has already been done. Her breathing is quickening and her muscles are shuddering and blood has started to trickle down from her left eye, a bright red tear, a sign of a body buckling.
I cannot speak for her, of course, but for me this is the second worst moment of the day. I just cannot imagine the pain she must be in, the panic she must be feeling, but I feel an echo of it in my belly, my bones—panic and pain—because her eye is bleeding and her body is struggling and we are alone here and the sea is not rising quickly enough and she is so strong and beautiful and her eye is blinking up at me and what can I do? There is nothing I can do. Except say hold on, hold on, your family is just across the bay, you’ll see them soon, hold on, hold on.
I haven’t put my wetsuit on yet, it is still in the van. I’d been in too much of a rush to help and now here I am, a kilometre away from the van, alone with this dolphin in the rising tide. The sea is freezing and I have completely lost the feeling in my feet and my fingertips, but I will not, cannot, leave her.
Across the bay, I see that the medics have arrived. They’ve come over from mainland and they have brought not only their stranding knowledge but also stretchers, tarps, ropes, a specialist vet on the other end of phone. And the coastguard is here, too, and two men are coming for us, are wading through the water to us, and I just keep whispering, hold on, hold on.
I have a reverence for human kindness. I am not religious, but I think it is the holiest thing in this life. And so when these two men kneel in the water, either side of this dolphin’s head, and one wipes the stream of blood from her eye, and the other tenderly wipes the blood from her blowhole, I hug the moment into me like a prayer.
The man who wipes the blood from her blowhole tells me that it looks like the blood isn’t coming from the blowhole after all, but from wounds around its edges, wounds most likely caused by a bird pecking at her before I arrived. This is good news, better than blood coming from the blowhole itself, but her bleeding eye is concerning them. The sort of concern that bites like frost.
We’re standing in almost a foot of water now, and noticing what I’m wearing, they ask if I have something warmer to change into. And so, a little reluctantly (although I know the dolphin is in the best of hands), I go back to the van to change. My hands are completely numb and my feet are too and getting into my wetsuit feels like unlocking a door after half a bottle of wine but eventually I am in, and as I get out of the van I am greeted with the most bizarre and brilliant view: the dolphin I had been tending has been inelegantly scooped into the front loader of a local farmer’s tractor, a tractor which is now heading across the beach towards the rest of the pod, the dolphin lifted into the air. She has seen it all today. Ocean, land, sky.
I get to the tractor just as it lowers the dolphin to the ground, and oh! Oh! This is incredible. The volunteers at this end of the beach have moved their five dolphins into a circle, all facing one another, and now this dolphin joins them, the missing piece, and I can see her looking at her pod-mates, and her eye has stopped bleeding, and her breathing is still fast but it suddenly feels like maybe it’ll be okay, maybe they will all be okay.
The tractor leaves and we all step back from the dolphins to give them time to relax in one another’s presence, to destress from the tractor and the noise and the movement, and now I hear the next stage of the plan: if all the dolphins pass their health checks, we will put them each on a stretcher and take them out to sea.
This is logistically difficult. There are five people in drysuits and me in a wetsuit and there are six dolphins, four of whom are adults and extremely heavy (as in, 13 to 23 stone each). And also, we can’t release them one by one. The first one released will just come back to shore, driven by an instinct we cannot name and cannot understand: the instinct to be with the pod no matter the cost. No, it is best to release them together.
And another complication, something I had not known: dolphin muscles seize up when they strand, so they are likely to drown if simply let go in deep water. They also lose their sense of balance and often cannot stay upright, and this can also lead to drowning. So, not only must they be taken to sea together, but they must be gently supported by human arms while they move their muscles and warm them back up, and they must be rocked gently from side to side to help them rebalance themselves. And then, finally, they can be guided into the deep.
After the health checks have been done, I hear that there is a problem. It is with the dolphin I’d been tending on the far side of the bay. Her breathing rate is too fast. The lead medic calls the vet. There are concerns about her health, that she may have too much internal damage. There are discussions of having to leave her behind. Of releasing the rest of the pod and then euthanising her afterwards.
This is the hardest moment of the day and I am a chaos of emotion: all the logic in me trying to calm all the parts that want to shout—please, let’s just give her a chance.
The problem is that if she is too sick to make it back to open water, she is likely to re-strand. This both increases her suffering and increases the likelihood of the whole pod re-stranding. Sometimes our innate responses are the ones we should attend to, and sometimes they are not. Either way, those instinctive reactions make themselves known, don’t they—they flood us and knot in our throats. But I swallow that desperate knot down and prepare for the fact that she may be left behind, she may be euthanised, and this would be for the best. For her. For the pod.
But then, thank god, her breathing rate normalises. The vet says she can be released. All of them can go, together. Ah, the relief!! But there is no time to soak it in because the tide is slipping in around us, lapping at our shins, and it is time—finally time—to take them to sea.
There is a flurry of activity as dolphins are loaded onto stretchers and taken into deeper water. I am given a life jacket, told to shout if I get too cold (I have far too much adrenaline to know if I am cold), but then I get assigned a job that does not immediately require wading into the deep. And oh my gosh, what a job it is. I am asked to care for the four-week-old, keep her blowhole above water while the other dolphins are taken to the sea.
We know she is four-weeks(ish) because we can still see her foetal folds: pale, vertical stripes on her flanks where she was folded up in her mother’s womb3. Gently, I hold her head up—a surprisingly heavy head, given her small size—and keep her blowhole above the surface as the tide comes rolling in. While doing this, I accidentally cover her eyes with my forearms and she begins to squirm, her little fluke thrashing, and a medic tells me to move my arms back a little so that she can see the rest of the pod. When the other dolphins are in her sight line, she instantly calms down.
And then! She whistles! I hear her voice!
These whistles come from ‘phonic lips’ (also known as monkey lips4) inside the blowhole. Of course, we do not know what she is saying, but given her age she is probably calling for her mother. When she is older, around a year old, she will name herself with a specific, unique whistle. She will do this by coming up with a noise (a ‘signature whistle’) that differs from the signature whistle of everyone she knows, and she will then use her name to identify herself to other dolphins, to tell them: I am here!
While this calf is too young to have a signature whistle, the adults will all have their own names. So, later, when I am supporting the adult male in the water (waiting for his muscles to warm up) and he begins to whistle, and then some of the other adults, all in a line next to us, do too, they may well be calling out their names. Indeed, studies have found that when dolphins strand, or find themselves in other stressful situations, they start calling their names more frequently, in an attempt to call for help from their pod-mates, and/or to find out who else is present5. So it is likely that what I am hearing as I support the weight of this gorgeous male, is the wild secret of his name. Of all their names. All of them saying: I am here, yes, I am here! Me too! Me too!
But they might be saying something else. We just don’t know. All I know for sure is that as we line them up on their stretchers, support them as the water rises, rock them gently from side to side and wait for them to find their balance, there is a conversation happening.
The male is becoming more and more mobile within my arms, his fluke moving like he wants to swim, his body staying upright without my help, and I notice that his head is craning, as if he is looking for someone. We realise that his view of the next dolphin in line is blocked by another volunteer. When they move and he can see the dolphin next to him—the female I had first tended—he relaxes. I feel this. The relaxation in his body. He’d just needed to see her; he’d just needed to know she was there.
And now, it is time.
We release them in two groups. The three liveliest, strongest adults are to be released first, followed by the two calves and remaining adult.
The male, the female I’d tended, and another adult female, are in group one. We walk them out into the ocean, leaving their stretchers behind. The male moves his fluke, up, down, up, down, and I move my hands slightly away from his body to check he is staying upright, swimming strongly, and then I let him go. At the same time, the female I'd tended is let go, too, and the two of them come together, side by side, so close I swear they are touching, and then they swim west, out towards the open ocean, slowly at first, and then faster, faster, faster, and we watch their dorsal fins disappear into the deep.
Two seals watch them, too. I have only just noticed them, bobbing up and down in the water near us, their moon eyes blinking around at this peculiar sight of dolphins and humans in a bay they should not be in; this peculiar sight of humans grinning, laughing, clapping, calling, ‘goodbye, good luck!’ after two disappearing dorsal fins.
But the celebrations do not last long, because the last dolphin of this group has swum free of her human and is circling back around, back towards shore. We try to sprint (hard in thigh-high water!), try to block her path back to shore, and we clap and we splash and we yell and we knock ourselves breathless. And while she does turn around, away from the shallows, she does not swim into the deep. She stays close. We think she must be the mother of one of the calves.
When the calves are let go, along with the final female, the four unite in the water. One of them breaks away, swims out west, and we hope the rest will follow but they do not. They stay in the bay, swimming back and forth, back and forth, and the sun is setting now, the sky nipped in blue and pinks just like our skin, and darkness is coming.
There is not much else we can do now, except hope and hope and hope that they find their way out, that they find their way to open water.
We can do nothing but wait for first light.
I have debated whether to write the final chapter of this story. We are in dark days, and aren’t we all searching for a shard of light? But nature is not a fairy tale, and I do not believe in contributing to the illusion that it is. To do so is to use the natural world as a tool for our own ends, rather than to respect it for what it is: a powerful, indifferent, brutal and beautiful force. To soften it, to aestheticise it, to bend it towards the light, is to put our own human hearts in the middle of it. But we are not in the middle. We are just a thread woven amongst a million others—the dolphin, the seal, the bat, the mayfly, the lobster, the lion, the oak. We are not the centre of the story.
So, I hope you will join me for this ending, but know that it is not the ending we had hoped for.
When the sun rises, I drive back to the bay. It is covered in great heaps of kelp and from the road it is impossible to tell if any of those dark heaps are dolphin-shaped, so I pull up outside the cottage that overlooks the bay, put my binoculars around my neck, and jump out of the van. As I do, one of the residents of the cottage emerges. From the way she is holding herself I know, instantly, that she is carrying heavy news.
Two have re-stranded, she tells me. One has died. One is still alive.
I go to them. They are there, high up the beach, in amongst the tangles of kelp, their bodies just feet apart. One is stiff, eyes closed, mouth open. One is gasping for breath.
They are both adults, and neither are the first female I tended to. But beyond that, I cannot work out who they are. Most likely, they are the final females to be released: the third of the first round, and the one adult in the second round. But it doesn’t really matter who they are. All that matters is that here, in front of me, is a dolphin in pain, struggling for breath, gasping and blinking and shuddering, and she is lying next to the body of her friend, and I do not know what to do, what to say, because the resident of the cottage has just told me that this dolphin is about to be euthanised—the vet has said she’s not strong enough to go back in the water—and what does a dolphin need in such a moment? What does a wild one need in their last minute? What does a wild one need when they are collapsing in on themselves like a dying star?
I say something to her. I don’t remember what. I think it is something like I’m sorry. And my instinct is to stay with her until the euthanising team comes, to speak to her softly, to cup seawater in my hands and dribble it down her back, but logic elbows her way past instinct and says to me, gently, firmly: this is a wild being who, all her life, has known only water and sky and the company of dolphins, and here she is now in shallow water, and here she is now with the swallowing sky, and here she is now next to her pod-mate, and you might like to think she needs you but she does not.
In her last minute, she needs the sound of ocean and the touch of water and the cradle of the wild.
In her last minute, grant her this.
I walk down the beach, sit on the sand, look out to sea.
In my periphery, I see that a truck has arrived, that it is driving onto the beach, that it is next to her now.
A shot rings out across the bay.
And then, silence.
And then, the gentle roar of the ocean.
.
.
.
Two did not survive. Four did. There is shadow, there is light. Horror, joy. Death, life. To know the world fully we must invite it all in; we must accept the shadow while we tend, tend, tend to the light.
The BDMLR medics and volunteers who attended this rescue had to drop everything to come. They travelled over an hour by boat and then spent 5 hours coordinating the rescue. Without their commitment and expertise, none of the dolphins would have survived. If this story touched you, please consider donating. You can do so here.
I read Chloe Hope's piece ‘what remains’ the Sunday before the stranding. Her words ‘I have to lay down my stories about what things mean and how things should be, and simply respond to what is’ were echoing within me as I decided whether to stay with the re-stranded dolphin or give her one last minute of space and wildness. Thank you, Chloe, for your words and your guidance.
I read Kendall Lamb's piece ‘What is Ours’ the day after the re-stranding. She talks about tending to what is ours to tend, and how this tending is an act of resistance in a world that, right now, seems to brim with darkness. Thank you, Kendall, for these beautiful words. They helped me find the ending to this piece.
All of this (sentience, intelligence, emotionality) is backed up by peer-reviewed research. If you’re interested, you can read more here.
This is the most likely reason this pod stranded, but of course we cannot know for sure. In 2008, a mass stranding of common dolphins in Cornwall, UK, was most likely caused by underwater military activity. And some mass strandings occur due to illness and disease.
Thank you so much, Rebecca, for this 360°-piece on life, and also for the reference to Chloe Hope's "what remains". I find what immediately follows your citation very wise and helpful and enlightening, too: "To engage with someone whose time it is to die with the intention of fixing the problem of their dying is a subtle violence which our culture encourages, and it’s one which we can guard ourselves against by learning to distinguish between what needs intervention and what needs witnessing." Witnessing is such a lost key activity and key aspect of life in our culture. as is an acceptance of forces and fates beyond our power or ken, together with the honing of our skills to be able to distinguish when intervention and when witnessing is needed. Thank you so much for sharing with us your hours with the dolphins.
I began my day with this, lying in bed, weeping as the sun rose and my heart woke up. I don't think I can find any words to express how I feel right now, even as much as I do love words, but I'll try. First, thank you for tending so beautifully to our more-than-human kin on the beach, along with the amazing crew who came so far to do their best for them. This line, "I have a reverence for human kindness. I am not religious, but I think it is the holiest thing in this life." and the resulting tenderness as they wiped the blood from her eye, just shattered me with recognition. And this one, " I feel this. The relaxation in his body. He’d just needed to see her; he’d just needed to know she was there." I had to actually turn away and let everything just crash over me. I'm still letting it all crash over me. The two souls that were lost, in the end, and your own holy recognition of what you could not tend to. This is its own kind of tending, I think. Sitting back and allowing the unthinkable, the grief, the crushing recognition that sometimes we have to allow the "what is" that Chloe so beautifully articulated. Thank you. To find my own essay mentioned at the end, to know that something I wrote this week helped midwife the ending to this incredible piece, well, I'll let that wash over me as well.