Pilot whales are highly social animals and have a natural instinct to look out for one another. <\/p>\n
Volunteers hope to bring the 15 stranded whales together in a “nice tight group” to help them refamiliarise with one another and swim out together, Hawkes said.<\/p>\n
They will attempt to refloat the whales this afternoon, but time is tight. “We have to do all of that before the tide turns and drops again,” Hawkes said.<\/p>\n
The group is calling for volunteers to help with the refloating.<\/p>\n
New Zealand’s conservation department has deployed rangers, a boat and a drone to Farewell Spit to monitor any further strandings.<\/p>\n
Mass strandings regularly occur at Farewell Spit, located on the northern-most tip of the South Island. <\/p>\n
The conservation department describes it as a “naturally occurring ‘whale trap'” located along a migratory route for long-finned whales.<\/p>\n
“Whales may be easily deceived and caught out by the gently sloping tidal flats and a rapidly falling tide,” it said in a statement on Thursday.<\/p>\n
In February 2017, more than 400 long-finned pilot whales washed up there \u2013 the largest stranding in New Zealand for more than 100 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pilot whales are highly social animals and have a natural instinct to look out for one another. Volunteers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":684148,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3847],"tags":[70,16,15,1717],"class_list":{"0":"post-684147","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115864373978077818","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/684148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}