Un minois de dauphin chez cette baleine à bosse.
Nous avons vu des images où il me semble qu'on voit clairement qu'elle saigne de la queue, comme sur cette photo, sur son côté gauche. Ma question, c'est: la curiosité des bateaux beaucoup trop proches l'aurait-elle tuée?
Pour le moment, silence des autorités. Secret d'état?
Et les cris des badeaux, était-ce une bonne idée alors qu'il fallait ne pas la stresser plus qu'elle ne l'était, souffrant, c'est un comble, de deshydratation, à marée basse sur le fond de la Tamise?
A notre époque de grandes émotions de foule, on perd souvent le peu d'intelligence que l'homme a de l'autre vivant.
Observer | After a day of frantic struggles, the London whale dies a lonely death
After a day of frantic struggles, the London whale dies a lonely death
Euan Ferguson joined the crowds on a poignant day by the Thames
Tuesday January 24, 2006
Observer
'He's lost his pod,' I heard a mum tell her daughter as she lifted her for a better view above the crowd, back when the crowd was manageable. And then, seconds later, 'No, darling, not his iPod. He's lost his ... well, his friends. His family.'
It was that kind of day. Londoners getting all friendly and funny with each other but under it all a strange, nagging confusion over how it would turn out. At 7pm on the dot we realised it had turned out pretty badly, when, despite a frantic £100,000 rescue mission, something like half of London's emergency services shivering all day in the Thames and messages of goodwill from around the world, London's new best friend perished on a barge, swathed in rubber and lifting gear, near the end of the journey back to salt water. The trauma of the rescue and too many hours out of the water had led to fatal spasms.
Hopes had been high. But it seemed that the only proper reaction to yesterday, as so often with nature, should have been a careful mix of wonder and sadness.
It had been one thing, for instance, to see London's whale blowing and arcing its way under Battersea Bridge. Perfectly equipped for cavorting 600 feet down in the Arctic Ocean and making life unhappy for squid; less so for the snorting riptides that bedevil the Thames and its bridges - but still, London's whale made it, coming up 200 yards west yesterday morning with a noisy gust and a welcoming cheer from the bank.
It was quite another, 30 minutes later, one minute before noon, to watch it beached, so obviously distressed. To see its would-be rescuers, up to their necks at times in the Thames, attempting to pat, push, calm, to somehow convey the feeling that there was goodwill from man, while that great tail began to flap so frantically. Were we going to end up with happy children, perfect endings: were we going to free Willy? Or were we going to end up with - there's no great way to put this - two tons of dead blubber?
There was something both awesome and other-worldly yesterday about walking along Sir Joseph Bazalgette's Chelsea Embankment, gazing at the forlorn and faded barges rendered somehow even more miserable by the gorgeous sunshine, and then seeing a whale blow.
We walked, the growing crowds, at 11am, following the boats as they followed the whale. We walked at whale's pace until we darted, hundreds of us, from one side to the other of the Albert Bridge, causing the first traffic jam of the day. Later police closed Battersea Bridge Road leading to, one assumes, some apologetic shrugs from lunch dates - sorry, I was held up by a whale.
We walked west of Battersea Bridge, crowds growing, the sound audible from the embankment of the crunch of hundreds of feet on shingle below as they raced back and forth. And then just before noon, at 11.53, I saw the dorsal fin burst out again, but facing east, towards the sea. Had London's whale sensed the sudden turn in the tide and started swimming against the (now incoming) tide, as whales do, and would it make it?
The answer was very soon no. For the next five minutes the whale was in danger of beaching - Tannoy calls came from the coastguard warning crowds away from the shingle's edge - and just before noon it grounded and the worries began, the floats and the cranes and the manhandling.
And the crowds began arriving, in true force - the banks of the Thames can never have been busier. Nobody could see much, but the mood was friendly, not jostling; rescue workers below called up, at 2pm, for some hot drinks and the shouts were relayed by the crowd to the nearest houses.
And, hours later, partygoers in Battersea pressed their noses against pub windows to see the latest developments, the bad news and the end of a strangely gripping story. In a month or less we will have forgotten; but the day will surely serve as some kind of benchmark. In the last day or so lovers will have been taken, jobs will have been won and lost, novels begun, tears shed at funerals, new life conceived and, when asked can you remember when that happened, we can answer: I remember it well, because it was that day. The day a whale sailed through the middle of London; and the people of the city, rather than trying to hack it to death, came in their thousands and lifted it and tried their hardest to sail it back.
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