Sometimes our most significant decisions come when we least expect them. Lorraine Culloch and her partner, Mike Roberts, were returning home from a trip photographing orcas in Aberdeen, Scotland, on an ordinary Sunday in May, according to The Dodo. They took a wrong turn and came upon something really unusual in a river inlet: a dolphin washed ashore in the shallow water.
She was presumably seeking food on the coast, like many other dolphins, when she got into difficulty. The worried pair was anxious about the dolphin’s survival. Her skin was burnt all over from being in the sun after being out of the water, and she was visibly battling to survive.
The res.cue mission was launched with the assistance of the British Divers Marine Life Res.cue (BDMLR) and the SSPCA. They wrapped towels around the bottlenose dolphin to preserve her skin from drying up in the low-tide seas. And the dolphin, according to Culloch, was the ideal patient.
They had to wait more than ten hours for the tide to come in and the dolphin to return to the sea. She was eventually hoisted into the water and began swimming out to sea. They were afraid that her severe sunburn would make returning to sea too pe.ril.ous, so they took the pa.in.ful choice to send her back.
This dolphin was just sighted swimming contentedly out at sea, which is a positive omen of things to come. In a recent Facebook post, the Cetacean Research & Rescue Unit said that she “had been verified alive by our colleagues at Aberdeen University this week!”
She will, however, have the scars of her frightening event for the rest of her life: Her skin is severely da.ma.ged, but she is alive, and we will keep a watchful check on her health in the coming months.
