Juvenile fin whale dies at Santa Cruz's Cowell Beach

The animal that was discovered there at Cowell Beach has died. We got that news after we first got on the stream with you about it. We understand now there is an effort underway to pull the animal out of the water so scientists can examine what it is exactly that went wrong. I'd like to go ahead and bring in my good friend and colleague Mark Sayre. He's been our reporter there at the scene. Mark, you're there. You're watching the spectacle play out in real life. Why don't you just go ahead and tell us what what you see as you probably have insight that we can't get from just watching it on a screen. Yeah, Garcia, it's taken a little bit of time to actually get some information, and that is because the authorities that are here managing this situation, they did not know what they were going to do because, of course, we have this big storm coming in with the big waves. They consider it very dangerous to try to actually tow it offshore. So let's push in here from this different angle that you have. And you can see what they've done now is they've brought in this big bulldozer. And if you look carefully, you can see that there is a line attached to the tail of the whale. That is basically an anchor line at this point. What they're doing here is they want to make sure that the whale does not... Float out to shore or wash up further onto the beach if it's perpendicular to potential waves that come in. So right now, they're in a holding pattern, but a decision has been made that they are not going to try to tow this whale out to sea, which is normally what they would do in a situation like this. They say with the incoming storm, with the watches that are out from the weather service, with the beaches all over the northern California coast, as we've been talking about, the safer thing to do, they say, is to bring the whale. On to shore. So they are trying to get a weight estimate of the whale. This is a thin whale. They believe it's between 25 and 30,000 pounds. So when you're dealing with something that large, obviously they've got to figure out what kind of equipment is it going to take to get this whale onto some sort of flatbed truck. So it is eventually going to be pulled out of the ocean. A truck is going to come down onto the beach, and their plan is to load the whale onto the truck and then take the whale to a location which, at this point, if they know where they're going to take it, they're not saying. But it sounds like they don't even know where it's going to go at this point because normally, as I said, the plan in situations like this is to get these whales out to sea, but they feel that it's too dangerous at this point with the storm coming in due to the fact that the whale could wash back onto shore. Sure, and again, up to 30,000 pounds. Now, there's a group at UC Santa Cruz that's called the Long Marine Lab, the Marine Mammal Stranding Network. They are the official authorized organization for Santa Cruz County, authorized by the federal government to manage things like this. So they are here on the scene managing this incident and making determinations, along with local officials here in the city of Santa Cruz, what to do. Now, this beach is a city of Santa Cruz beach. This is not a state beach. We do have a Cal State beach. Up the coast in San Mateo County, this beach is Cowell Beach, which is a city of Santa Cruz Beach. So this incident, from a law enforcement standpoint at this point, is being managed by a Santa Cruz fire and the Santa Cruz lifeguards. Now, as for the timeline, Garcia, we simply don't know. Again, this is a large engineering operation to get this whale up. They don't know where the truck is going to come from, where it's going to go. We can tell you it's been drawing massive numbers of spectators. Gerard, if you don't mind, why don't you just take a pan to the left and swing by me here. Let's show you. We're here at the Santa Cruz Wharf and you can see a lot of these people were actually down on the beach initially and now they're here on the wharf watching this operation and it is a very large number of people here because obviously it's a sight that you don't see very often. One more data point on the time of death, Garcia. You mentioned that. The whale was alive when they first got here. The first calls came in of the beach whale around 8 o'clock in the morning. There were signs of life from the blowhole. The mammal experts were here watching it. They believe the whale died at about 10-15 here on the beach. They say the whale... ...is thin, even though it's a 25 to 30,000 pound whale. They do consider it to be a thin whale. They believe it's in some kind of disease process that killed it. They want to do a necropsy, of course, which is where they look at the whale scientifically to see what the cause of death was. At this point, they simply don't know, but they believe it is a... A disease process of some sorts that's been going on for a few weeks. So I'm going to catch my breath here for a second. Garcia, if you have any questions, we'll push out there and I'll let Gerard show you the view from here. And go ahead. Yeah, first of all, you've been doing great. Thank you for all the insight and information that only someone who is actually there at Cowell Beach can give us. So our viewers know, our helicopter had to move away, but we are just really going to sit on this live picture. Thanks to you and our photojournalist, Gerard. Here we can see a completely different viewpoint of the whale. First of all, I'll ask you, Mark, I'm not really great at estimating size and distance and all that. Originally, I read that it was about a 30-foot fin whale, but earlier we saw two guys in wetsuits out in the water, and if we're going to assume each of them is about 6 feet tall, this whale looked a lot more than five guys who'd be standing head to toe. Does 30 feet still sound right to you, or do you think it's much bigger than that? You know, it's hard to say. They gave us the weight information, but not the length information. Obviously, that is information they are looking for. The people in the wetsuits that you saw, they were attaching that harness to the tail.