A whale of a tragedy on the beach

ON the morning last week when a whale came up the bay, I found four missed calls on my telephone at 10am.

I thought for a minute that it was Murphy’s Law again, the whole world would have seen the whale but not your wildlife correspondent.

However, happily — or rather, unhappily — this was not the case. The whale was going nowhere and, even as I write this an hour after seeing it, seems set to be available for viewing for some time, a tragic spectacle, for how can the tides shift this creature as big as a barn and weighing as much as 18 Land Rovers?

The night before, I had been up late, trawling through articles for comments I’d made on little egrets and their colonisation of the south coast and Courtmacsherry Bay. A parent of a girl at St Joseph’s National School in Clonakilty had asked if I could provide information for a Cork Heritage competition entry on egrets and other waders undertaken by the pupils. I found I could trace their history in the bay from 1990 when I’d mentioned a lone bird, then a rarity, to their first successful nesting colony and the chicks perched in trees “like cotton wool balls on spindles, a hundred feet above [my head]”.

I went to bed at three am. At 10, I lifted the phone to discover the morning alive with news of the whale, and rushed out hoping I would not be too late.

I had missed the killer whales in the Lee in Cork in June 2001. After half the city had watched them for a week off Patrick Street bridge, I returned from abroad to be told they were still cavorting at Passage West. I hurried there that evening only to learn they had left the river the night before, never to return. Had the same thing happened with the Courtmacsherry fin whale? Unfortunately, no.

I say unfortunately because it died within three hours of stranding and, by the time I arrived at ten thirty, it was like a collapsed, grey barrage balloon or giant bin bag, far out on the sands.

A friend kindly gave me a lift around the bay and I stood, with others, alongside a line of 40 cars, looking at it through a telescope as the tide receded and the first intrepid investigators crossed the channel that divided it from the road. Soon, others were wading across, some in wellingtons, some bare-footed in the cold, knee-deep water. Meanwhile, whole families arrived with children and dogs, and the garda came to control the traffic. I decided I would rush home and write this article and return when the tide had ebbed further and the crowds had thinned.

Later, when the experts had investigated, I would hear the data, the length, weight and condition of the creature, what likely led to its demise and what could now be done with the enormous body. I had seen enough through the powerful telescope to appreciate the extent of the tragedy, to see the huge bulk of the beast dwarfing the humans that stood around, to gauge the size of the broad tail, to catch the gleam of the winter sun on the steel-grey skin and the sickle-shaped fin on the vast back, the see the light and shadow defining the throat grooves.

How sad it was to see such a powerful creature beached and lifeless. Looking out at the sandbank, with the wind-blown sea breaking in hazy white caps beyond, I was reminded of Shelley’s bleak and lonely line, “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, Boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

But the whale, unlike King Ozymandias, was innocent of pride, a true master of its element and awesome still, even in death.

Leviathans die too; it had not beached by accident. Ozymandias, too, succumbed.