Costa Rica is a country rich in history and natural beauty, which is why Christopher Columbus named it “rich coast” when he settled there centuries ago. Wild animals are abundant from coast to coast, and sometimes they need help, which is something a couple of surfers realized when they heard an animal crying.
Local Costa Rican Mauricio Camareno and his friends were out catching waves when they noticed something they had never seen before. The men saw a strange lump protruding from the mouth of a small river and, fortunately, decided to investigate.
As they approached the lump, they began to hear crying and moved closer to help the animal. The animal wound up being a baby pilot whale that got stranded from the low tide in the early hours of the morning.
Thankfully, the surfers had arrived at 5am to get in an early session of surfing and decided to instead help the poor whale and return her to the ocean.
Camareno told Amelia Rueda,
“She was very weak and could not keep afloat.”
The whale had made it up the river about 50 meters from the sea, making it difficult for her to navigate back in the shallow waters. The surfers pulled the small but heavy baby all the way to the sea, but their work wasn’t over yet.
Since the baby had been there for an unknown amount of time struggling to return to sea, she had become exhausted and couldn’t swim, let alone keep herself afloat to breathe.
Rather than letting her go off on her own before she was ready, the surfers stuck around and held her to the surface of the water to help her stay breathing while she regained her strength. The task took them about six hours, at which point the pilot whale told the surfers she was recharged and ready to go during high tide when she swam away into deeper waters.
Though there are concerns about whether she will find her pod, animals are very smart and her pod may have been quietly waiting for her to return to them before they swam off.
Some have also pointed out that the rescuers should have alerted wild life experts to aid in the whale’s rescue, to which the group responds that they did alert two organizations, both of which never showed up. Locals called the Coast Guard and Costa Rica’s Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE), and MINAE said they would send a veterinarian to first check if the whale had any diseases, but no one ever responded to the scene.
The whale is lucky to have had such concerned animal lovers come to her rescue that morning, and we hope she is back to living a happy life with her pod.
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