Large whale stranded on the German Baltic coast - rescue underway

The animal was discovered in the water off the Niendorf district of the municipality of Timmendorfer Strand on Monday night, according to the police. It had been spotted on a kind of sandbank. The whale is still alive.

A police spokesperson said this morning that they were now trying to use all possible means to bring the animal back to where it could continue swimming. "This is of course proving difficult." Experts from the Institute for Terrestrial and Aquatic Wildlife Research (ITAW) have been called in and are on their way to Niendorf. They will then be able to say more precisely what kind of whale it is.

It is important that bystanders do not approach the animal so as not to stress it even more, said the police spokesman. Neither from the air, for example with a drone, nor from the water or land. The relevant area around Niendorf harbor had been cordoned off.

Whale sighted in the region for some time

It is suspected that the whale is the same animal that has been spotted repeatedly in the Baltic Sea for some time. It was first spotted in Wismar harbor at the beginning of the month. At that time, emergency services had largely freed the whale from a net in which it had previously become entangled.

Last Friday, the same whale was freed from further net remnants off Travemünde by the marine conservation organization Sea Sheperd, as the organization had announced. Sea Sheperd assumes that it is a humpback whale.