Wail for the Whale

As the shores of New Zealand woke up this morning, news began to emerge and an urgent appeal was spread to encourage anyone nearby to drop their commitments and get themselves to  Farewell Spit in Golden Bay at the top of the South Island.
Here the confounded public, with their towels, buckets and sheets as instructed, stared at the 416 whales before them - each one of them dying.

Whales stranded at Golden Bay in New Zealand
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-newzealand-whales-idUKKBN15P06K?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social

No-one quite knows how they got there, or why it occurred. Whale stranding is common here in the 'whale trap' but that does not detract from the duty and dedication locals have to their helping their habitat; all through the day and night they were prepared to stay and as I type this sentence, there they are still working.

The workers soon found that only 100 were still living. The rest were now merely corpses in the sand. At 10:30 they were all re-floated in high tide, yet the low tide and the social side to their species, brought them back to shore in the early afternoon.
“We are trying to swim the whales out to sea and guide them but they don’t really take directions, they go where they want to go. Unless they get a couple of strong leaders who decide to head out to sea, the remaining whales will try and keep with their pod on the beach.” Lamason, a team leader for the Department of Conservation reported.

And as the group of up to 500 volunteers continue to devote their time to an event that strikes them as important, we must look deeper into the need to keep such wonderful diversity on this earth.

Volunteers are coming to the aid of the 100 surviving whales
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-newzealand-whales-idUKKBN15P06K?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social
This species is wonderful. Beneath it's majestic, smooth and streamlined features, lies an astounding history; whales evolved from horses. They are horses that returned to the sea.
In this modern world though, why should we save such creatures?
We don't see them very much. Their community is vast and lies within a sea we know so little about. One aspect scientists are interested in currently is their faeces. A diet of iron-rich krill results in natural fertiliser for the sea. From this, an ecosystem circles and is linked from one sea to the next.

An essential player in a huge system, that is who they are. It's what every species is. All the endangered ones that we so rightly should respect are part of this system too. And so are we.
We who have spent the last 200 years throwing what we liked into the skies and chucking what we wished into the seas. We are a part of this system and we need to change it before it's too late.

At this moment, those volunteers are some of the strongest people about. Acting with their gut and doing what they feel is right. I look up to them right now.

H _ M
    :)

Bibliography:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/10/hundreds-whales-die-mass-stranding-new-zealand-beach
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/22/the-eco-guide-to-saving-the-whale
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4209902/Hundreds-whales-stranded-New-Zealand-beach.html

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