In the light of early dawn, animal rescue crews in New Brunswick headed out on boats and banged together metal rods in hopes of herding six stray white-sided dolphins trapped in an isolated pool of water back to sea.
It was the team’s second attempt to usher the pod back to open water after the dolphins wandered down a shallow channel and ended up marooned in the pool in Lamèque, N.B., last week. One dolphin has died since the pod became lost.
The most challenging part of the rescue is convincing the dolphins to swim through the long waterway, which only measures one-metre deep during high tide, to reach the ocean.
The crews worked in low light around 7 a.m., a time chosen for the high tide, but the dolphins didn’t appear to be receptive to the underwater sound.
“There was a few tail slaps and some vocalizations that we could hear. So it was bugging them, but that is part of the process -- to try and herd them you have to kind of convince them to go where they don’t want to,” Andrew Reid of the Marine Animal Response Society told CTV Atlantic.
Dolphins hunt and communicate using echolocation, making them sensitive to high-pitch sounds under water.
The society, which worked alongside officials from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, banged the rods together for about an hour before realizing that the tactic simply wasn’t working.
“Because the pool is very deep, they were able to continually evade us, swim around the boats, or swim under the boats,” Reid said.
Fisheries officers Gabriel Albert said they called off the operation when it appeared the dolphins “seemed to be happy” where they were.
The rescue team is now considering using a “pinger” device to corral the animals, but they are waiting for the device to be shipped from the U.S. The equipment is typically used by fishermen to deter dolphins from fishing nets.
Should this option fail to drive the dolphins to safety, the society says it will look at a more aggressive option, but manually moving the dolphins presents new obstacles.
“We would get them on stretchers and pontoons and once we have control of them then we can either tow them out of the area or load them onto trucks and put them on the ocean side,” said Reid.
In order to beach the animals and load them onto stretchers they would need to work with the tides either early in the morning or late at night. However crews are trying to avoid this dangerous option if they can.
The most pressing threat to the animals, all of which are young calves, is the dwindling food supply.
Atlantic white-sided dolphins are common in Atlantic Canada. They can reach 3 metres in length and can weigh 220 kilograms.
The Marine Animal Response Society has asked on Facebook if people in the area could be patient as we attempt to get these animals to open ocean in the safest manner possible.”
With files from CTV Atlantic’s Cami Kepke
