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Whale stays clear of trouble
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A minke whale freed from an eastern Scottish harbour last week has shown no sign of returning to the area in which it was ensnared.
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The 4m-long juvenile minke had swum into Fraserburgh Harbour having, it is thought, followed fishing boats out of curiosity as they returned to port.
Seemingly confused by all the sounds of boats moving about in the harbour, and its own sonar ricocheting off the harbour's walls, it could not find its way out again.
It took a full day of effort, by volunteers including trained marine mammal medics from British Divers Marine Life Rescue, to secure the animal's passage back out through the harbour mouth, which includes a seabed lip that may have confused the whale further.
In the end, the minke was shepherded to the entrance by an array of strategically positioned craft, from which scaffolding poles were lowered into the water and hit to create a hollow, metallic sound, forcing the whale to move away in the required direction.
Since then, the whale has shown no sign of returning to continue its previous, seeming investigation of human activity. 'We last saw it heading east into the North Sea, in a healthy, purposeful swimming manner,' BDMLR's publicity manager Tony Woodley told Divernet. 'We're happy to report that it has not been seen anywhere near Fraserburgh since.'
The happy ending contrasts with the sad conclusion, in late July, of an attempt by BDMLR to save a northern bottlenose whale that had swum up the River Orwell, near Ipswich.
The whale, thought to be a juvenile about 4.5m long, was humanely destroyed by BDMLR vets after attempts to coax it back into the open sea failed and it became clear that the whale was going to succumb to dehydration and/or starvation.
To arrive in the Orwell, the creature would have been well out of its normal cruising area between Norway and Iceland or the Faroe Islands.
A number of these whales have appeared off Britain's East Coast over the past 18 months, and all have perished. The best-known example is that in London's Thames last January. But others have died at Skegness, in Lincolnshire, and in the Humber, near Hull.
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