The Strange Saga of Timmy, the Stranded Humpback Whale

The humpback whale stranded in the Baltic Sea waits in a barge to be transported to the North Sea.Photograph by Stefan Sauer / dpa / Reuters Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story In early March, a young male humpback whale appeared where humpback whales are not supposed to be: in the Baltic Sea, just off the coast of Wismar, in northern Germany. The animal—forty feet long and weighing twelve tons, roughly the scale of a city bus—was tangled up in fishing net and rope. Firefighters went out in boats to cut it free. Sven Biertümpfel, who scuba-dived next to the whale as an employee of the nonprofit Sea Shepherd Germany, told me that he couldn’t get close enough to remove some gill netting that remained on its body and in its mouth. “He was really stressed out and he was not happy about having boats around,” Biertümpfel told me, of the whale. “We could just direct him out of the harbor, and then he got out, completely, to the open sea.”

A few weeks later, in a seaside resort town thirty miles away, some hotel guests complained about strange noises. The whale turned out to be stranded on a nearby sandbank. This time, firefighters joined veterinarians from the Institute for Terrestrial and Aquatic Wildlife Research (I.T.A.W.), who examined the whale from a dinghy. Big boats from the German Federal Coast Guard then motored by in an attempt to dislodge the whale with its wake. Instead, the whale moved closer to the shoreline. A sand dredger tried to create a runnel, but the sand was too dense. Next came a special excavator, with flotation devices that kept it on the water’s surface.

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