Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Wildlife Wednesday - dead thing (with pics)

I know I was going to do things I knew from now on... but that was before this washed up on our beach. It's too incredible not to share with you. Well, I hope you don't mind blubbery mess photos.

So, on Tuesday, Mr E comes home from his morning (think dark of morning, not when the sun shines - a time I know nothing about except for when I'm reading a good book and get carried away and haven't yet slept!) walk and says, "When the tide goes out, you have to see this whale on the beach." We had a whale washed up on our beach a few years back, so I was imagining that sort of thing (a whole whale that was identifiable).

We go down to the beach later in the day at a reasonable hour when the tide is no longer covering the whale. And this is what I see!

"Is it a whale?" I ask, while covering my nose and then pinching it tight because the stench is horrendous.

I can't talk or breathe any more, so I shoot some pics, thinking that I'll identify the mess when I get home and my eyes aren't watering from the awful awful smell. And yes, there was a man fishing, in the zone of the smell - he must have had dead olfactory senses!

I look at these photos and I've no idea what it is. I guess it has to be some type of whale because it's big (maybe 3 m long or so), and that bone sticking up is huge (maybe close to 60 cm across). But I'm guessing with measurements here because I had to run from the smell! But look at how many footprints it takes for us to walk past it - it would have to be 3 or 4 m long.

So... a couple of days later (I forget what happened but I didn't get there the next day - must have gone out or something), I went down to take another look and get some more photos...and there wasn't much left!

We've had a lot of beach erosion lately due to changes in our beach last June (when the old river mouth opened due to flooding). So our dunes are ripped right back to half what they were. And the old river mouth is filling back up, so there is some sand deposition...but I didn't think there was enough sand being tossed back on short to cover this up!

There weren't any tracks from machinery, although they may have been washed away, but if machinery did it, why did they leave the bone?

My Dad said crabs would have picked it clean this quickly! Wow! Just wow! I've seen hardly any crabs at our beach, but I guess they could have all come for a feast - it certainly would have been worth their while! And there are birds. Fish may have helped too at high tide.

It's pretty impressive that the ocean can get rid of big secrets so quickly, isn't it?

If we hadn't gone down that first day, I would have thought Mr E was hallucinating in the early morning shadows!


If you're a carcase expert and you know what my mystery creature is, please feel free to share :)


Oh... more to add to this. Today (14th Feb), maybe 10 days after the mystery, a non-mystery washed up on the beach. So I went and took some photos and looked at the size. Today's dead fur seal, which you can read about here, was about one third of the size of the mystery carcase. So although I was a bit hesitant about the size of the mystery, today I'm very confident that it was BIG and whale size.

I stuck a footprint near the seal (not too near, this one stank too!) so you can get an idea of the size. And then I dug out some photos from the last whale that washed up, and I remember the size of that one didn't seem too huge, until you were right near it. It was startling for me to realise how big our beach was, and that there could be 100s of whales out there and you'd never know.







5 comments:

  1. If the tide came in, could it have been fish as well?

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  2. Oh, damn, that wasn't Rhyll, that was George! I'm just signed into the Ninja email;)

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    1. Hello Rhyll/George,
      It could have been fish, but they would have had to eat quickly because the tide isn't that high for very long :)

      Thanks for stopping by.

      Cate xo

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  3. I wonder what Mr Fur Seal died of. You know, it's a problem when big whales get beached on public beaches. They usually dynamite them to break them into smaller parts because one big corpse is too difficult to bury or move. I imagine the stench is horrendous.

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    1. The vet in the paper said he thought Mr Fur Seal died of old age. There didn't look like a lot wrong with him.

      The intact whale we had a few years ago was too remote to be dragged out to sea, which was one option. They did talk blowing her up but then decided she was remote enough just to allow nature to take her course. But on more populated beaches near here, they have blown some up. I can't imagine how it smells when they blow it up, or how far the bits go.

      Thanks for stopping by.

      Cate xo

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