The Strange Saga of Timmy, the Stranded Humpback Whale

In early March, a young male humpback whale appeared where humpback whales are not supposed to be: in the Baltic Sea, just off the coast of Wismar, in northern Germany. The animal—forty feet long and weighing twelve tons, roughly the scale of a city bus—was tangled up in fishing net and rope. Firefighters went out in boats to cut it free. Sven Biertümpfel, who scuba-dived next to the whale as an employee of the nonprofit Sea Shepherd Germany, told me that he couldn’t get close enough to remove some gill netting that remained on its body and in its mouth. “He was really stressed out and he was not happy about having boats around,” Biertümpfel told me, of the whale. “We could just direct him out of the harbor, and then he got out, completely, to the open sea.”

A few weeks later, in a seaside resort town thirty miles away, some hotel guests complained about strange noises. The whale turned out to be stranded on a nearby sandbank. This time, firefighters joined veterinarians from the Institute for Terrestrial and Aquatic Wildlife Research (I.T.A.W.), who examined the whale from a dinghy. Big boats from the German Federal Coast Guard then motored by in an attempt to dislodge the whale with its wake. Instead, the whale moved closer to the shoreline. A sand dredger tried to create a runnel, but the sand was too dense. Next came a special excavator, with flotation devices that kept it on the water’s surface.

Around that time, a celebrity biologist and adventurer named Robert Marc Lehmann showed up in a gray-camouflage wetsuit. “You can tell he’s afraid,” he told reporters on the beach. “He doesn’t feel well, and he is in a truly shitty position.” Another excavator arrived, working from a temporary construction road that stretched into the water, and nudged its bucket against the whale in an effort to jostle the animal free. By the next morning, the whale had swum away.

Volunteers set out in small boats to make sure that the whale didn’t get stuck again. They banged on the sides of their vessels to try scaring it back toward a more hospitable habitat. Humpbacks thrive in the North Atlantic; the Baltic is comparatively shallow, low in salinity, and heavily trafficked. But the next day, the whale was discovered to be stuck again, in water near Wismar that was little more than six feet deep. It swam a little, then got stuck again, then swam some more. Finally, it became stranded in a V-shaped natural harbor off Poel Island. It stayed there, unmoving, for four days.

By the time I got to the whale, an expert from the German Oceanographic Museum had said in a press conference that any further rescue efforts would amount to torture. “We believe that the whale will die there,” the expert said. A scientist from the museum had even invited me to observe a necropsy of its remains, when the time came. On a street by the harbor, crowds of people were squinting into the distance, exclaiming every time the whale exhaled. A little farther on, at the edge of a cow field, police officers were maintaining a perimeter, preventing the public from coming within five hundred and fifty yards. Journalists were allowed to get closer.

From the shore, under a gray sky, the whale looked like a sliver of rock protruding from the sea. Every so often, a spray of water exploded from its blowhole. After gazing out at it for a few minutes, I turned around and spotted Till Backhaus, the environment minister for the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, surrounded by a small troupe of German reporters. I fell in beside him. “We have committed to accompanying this whale to the very end,” he told me. “This is an emotional topic for me personally, because when you love animals, you die with the whale.”

In the middle of our conversation, Backhaus’s cellphone started to ring. It was Lehmann, the biologist. He wanted to talk to Backhaus about what could still be done. Lehmann was convinced that the institutions that had taken responsibility for the whale were failing; he was decrying them on social media. Members of the public were becoming increasingly angry that experts seemed to be giving up. People who had taken part in rescue missions were even receiving online death threats. Meanwhile, two German multimillionaires were clamoring to mount a private rescue operation. No one, it seemed, was content to leave the whale in peace.

There is something wondrous about whales. Their grandeur and immensity manage to surprise us even in an age when humans are building larger and larger things. A whale is huge and alive, as majestic as a mountain yet as graceful as an eel; it demonstrates the magnificence of the planet and proves that wild things still exist. In equal measure, a beached whale is appalling. On land, a whale’s vastness becomes its downfall: its own weight crushes its internal organs. A whale that can’t be rescued seems like a sign that we have failed to protect the riches we stumbled into.

Shortly after Lehmann’s first visit to the whale, he took to social media with footage of himself squatting in the shower, naked. “This is how you look after two nights without sleep, without food, after hours in 3-degree Baltic sea water,” he wrote, which is about thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. He accused I.T.A.W. experts of excluding him from rescue operations because they thought he was obsessed with self-promotion. “The most exhausting part of a mission is always just people, never animals,” he wrote.

A few weeks later, Lehmann uploaded an hour-long YouTube documentary that quickly racked up millions of views. He included footage of Stephanie Groß, an I.T.A.W. veterinarian, pointing out that his filming plans would be another source of stress for the whale. “I think that this documentation is incredibly important,” he tells her.

“This is a documentation that you will use on your own channels,” she replies.

“You guys can have it all,” Lehmann says. “I don’t even want to be here.”

“Then what are you doing here?” Groß asks. In a subsequent clip, she calls Lehmann a troublemaker.

Lehmann’s posts had charisma. A cameraperson filmed him addressing rescue volunteers; mesmerizing drone footage set to emotional music showed him swimming next to the whale. He portrayed himself as the lone person with the courage and clear-sightedness to form a bond with the animal. Backhaus and other officials kept insisting that Lehmann hadn’t been excluded, but they no longer had control of the narrative. On social media, the whale had been dubbed Timmy, after the first sandbank that he was stranded on. There was a sense that the people in charge of the operation were incompetent or, worse, deliberately prevaricating. The experts kept saying things that no one wanted to hear.

Whale biologists generally hold that a whale that repeatedly strands itself usually has severe underlying health issues; even towing it back out to deeper waters may not keep it from starving or drowning. This whale was in terrible condition. His skin was blistered, cracked, and tinged a strange yellow, as though he were rotting. The culprit was freshwater skin disease: the whale couldn’t cope with such low salinity levels. No one knew how deep into his digestive system the gill net might have gone. He had lacerations on his back, almost certainly caused by a collision with a ship. Clearly, humans were responsible for much worse than failing to rescue the creature. Even the excavator that nudged the whale seemed to have caused injury: footage of the effort showed a bright bloom of blood tinting the waves. As time went on, water began to collect in the whale’s lungs.

There are whale experts who can euthanize a humpback whale, for example, by inserting a needle the size of a human arm into its heart. This method could entail spurts of blood or violent death throes. The authorities ruled this out. On his own, though, the whale might take weeks to die. Humpback whales, which use baleen in their mouths to filter krill and fish out of seawater, can go months without eating; they migrate thousands of miles from their breeding grounds, in places like the Cape Verde Islands, off West Africa, up to feeding grounds near the Arctic. Unlike toothed whales, which navigate using echolocation, baleen whales rely on a combination of tools like sight, the currents of the ocean, and—according to some scientists—Earth’s magnetic field.

Maybe the whale in Poel had become disoriented. Maybe he chased a herring run into the Baltic Sea. But neither factor would explain the whale’s repeated stranding. Biertümpfel told me that the fishing net looked relatively new; it probably hadn’t been there for long enough to starve the animal. Tamara Narganes Homfeldt, a marine biologist for Whale and Dolphin Conservation, wondered whether a sick whale might inadvertently get stranded while seeking refuge from the open ocean. “He would be easy prey for orcas or sharks,” Homfeldt told me. “From a behavioral perspective, shallow waters are actually quite safe for whales.”

A few days after the whale was left to die, Backhaus changed course. He now wanted to strap the whale between the hulls of a special catamaran from Denmark. Some hope was returning: the German tabloid Bild reported that the whale had slapped the water with his fluke and arched his back, “as though he wanted to inhale deeply.” There were reports that the water level could rise. Then the catamaran idea was rejected, on the ground that it might mangle the whale’s skin. Demonstrators on Poel Island broke through the police barrier and rushed to the shore. A woman even jumped off a nearby ferry and swam within a few yards of the whale. She was hauled out of the water by officials.

Two wealthy Germans—Karin Walter-Mommert, a racehorse owner, and Walter Gunz, the multimillionaire founder of MediaMarkt—also wanted to save the whale. “We benefit so much from the animal world,” Gunz said. “We can give something back.” Backhaus initially declined to involve them in the rescue effort, but they began assembling a team that hoped to put airbags underneath the whale, lift him up, and attach him to floating pontoons that could be towed to the North Atlantic.

One night, Jenna Wallace, a veterinarian in Hawaii who had worked with dolphins and orcas, but not with humpbacks, was reading about the whale in bed after a few glasses of wine. Wallace, who has a swoop of blond hair and a bright smile, decided to post about him. “THIS ANIMAL WANTS TO LIVE!” she wrote on social media. “WHY HASN’T THE GOVERNMENT taken this animal out to deep waters or allowed others to do so?” She added, “a big fat F@CK YOU to the museum who apparently has been wanting a skeleton of a whale.” The next day, she discovered that her post had gone viral, and she soon got a call from Walter-Mommert, who wanted to fly her out. “I thought it was fake, honestly,” Wallace told me. “If you ask how many veterinarians in the world have experience with humpback whales that have been stranded for weeks, that list is pretty short. . . . Any naysayers can go fuck themselves.”

When Wallace got to Germany, she went out on a paddle board and was relieved to find the whale responsive. He was trying to dislodge himself by moving his pectoral fins like a turtle, but thick silt was acting almost like a suction cup. That night, in her hotel, Wallace and Sebastian Strand, an aptly named stranding expert from Norway, sketched a new plan on the back of a drinks menu. If they pointed the turbines of underwater scooters beneath the whale, to loosen the substrate, and then wrapped his pectoral fins with fire hoses that were attached to a boat, perhaps they could yank the whale out of the mud.

The details were hazy, however, and the team was patchy. The other veterinarians involved had no experience with whales; one focussed on horses. Felix Bohnsack, a twenty-two-year-old mechanical-engineering student, was ostensibly coördinating the work. Journalists had mistaken Bohnsack for an expert because of a jacket he was wearing—he volunteered for a wildlife-assistance organization—and one of the organizers had recruited him after liking what he’d said on camera. Wallace told me that another member of the rescue operation, who called himself the Whale Whisperer, insisted on being near the animal to form a spiritual connection with him. The Whale Whisperer was joined by, among others, a YouTuber who went by Danny.Firstclass. “Both the YouTuber and the Whale Whisperer think they can talk to the whale,” Wallace told me.

Backhaus, as environment minister, eventually allowed the ragtag crew to proceed. A floating excavator worked to dig a channel for the whale. The rescuers were going to inflate airbags underneath the animal, but then the water level rose, and one morning the whale began to swim. Wallace and her collaborators scrambled to get into the water; the whale was swimming in the wrong direction, toward some docks. They encircled the whale in boats and Jet Skis and repositioned him. But the water was too shallow, and he became stranded again.

Wallace accused the Whale Whisperer and Danny.Firstclass of getting too close in an attempt to get footage, steering the whale in the wrong direction. Soon, newspapers revealed that Danny.Firstclass, whose face was half covered in tattoos, was actually Danny Hilse, who was rumored to have ties to the Hells Angels and who had attended far-right political demonstrations. Wallace, fed up with what she called “ridiculous people,” flew back to Hawaii. Shortly thereafter, one of the only other veterinarians on the private rescue team showed signs of a stroke and was rushed to the hospital.

By this point, most of Germany’s major news organizations were live-blogging the whale’s plight. “He moves, he swims,” one news site declared. “Then he comes up again a ways forward and exhales a plume into the air. What this means is unclear.” A live stream from a YouTube account called News5 included a chyron: “These images could be harmful. Take care of yourself.” The rescue team, meanwhile, had a new idea. They would load the whale into a fifty-foot barge and pull him out to sea.

It took days for the barge, propelled by a push boat, to traverse the Kiel Canal and arrive. The rescue started on the morning of April 28th. A soft northern light illuminated the bay. By midmorning, rescuers began moving a fire hose under the whale’s belly and around his pectoral fins. Almost two dozen people began to pull with brute force. Someone would shout “Pull!” and everyone would lean against the hose. Hours went by. The rescuers were freezing. The whale didn’t move.

Finally, in the afternoon, the whale raised his fluke. In a series of quivering waves, he propelled himself toward the barge. Walter-Mommert was watching drone footage from her home, texting furiously with Wallace. “It’s very close to the channel right now,” she typed. “Then he can really float, Jenna.”

The whale strayed to the left. “Can they attach straps to the peduncle and pull there too as well as pecs?” Wallace texted back. “To get him pulled more aligned.” Soon, his trajectory straightened, and yells filled the air. “Super!” “Careful!” “There she goes!” “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” At last, the whale glided into the barge. The shouts become whistles of joy. After sunset, the barge set out for sea.

The next night, I talked to Pedro Baranda, a biologist accompanying the whale on a route through the islands of Denmark. Many of the experts who had argued for letting the whale die had not changed their minds; they still doubted that the whale would survive. But Baranda was optimistic, and told me that the whale was lifting his head and looking up at the rescue crew curiously. A satellite-tracking tag had been attached to his dorsal fin, which will allow researchers to keep tabs on his whereabouts. “No one has ever attempted anything like this with a humpback whale,” Baranda reminded me.

Three days later, on a clear, bright morning, I texted Baranda to check in on the whale.

“He’s free!” Baranda said. He sent me a video of a still, royal-blue sea, the barge in the distance. Suddenly, a spray of white blooms into the sky.

“He was gently pulled using a quick-release lasso in case things were wrong, and he was released into the North Sea,” Baranda added. “Breathed deeply a couple of times and he dove. We lost sight of him.”

Thousands of whales strand every year, and even more die out of sight, mostly from the consequences of human activities. They go hungry in oceans that are rampantly overfished. They grow disoriented because of noise pollution from shipping, oil drilling, and military operations. They are lacerated by propellers. They choke on trash and tangles of net. The rescue of a single animal does not ameliorate any of these risks—and, if anything, convoluted efforts to save one whale might distract from the work of protecting a species and its habitat. Strand, the Norwegian expert, told me that the most famous whale rescuers he knew had tried to talk him out of working on the private rescue operation. He only decided to go to Poel after officials decided not to euthanize the animal. For all of the commitments he feels to the natural world as a whole, he told me, there was still the moral problem of the one whale, suffering.

After the barge left Poel Island, Strand asked me what I thought about the whale’s story. I said I didn’t know. Many news stories had trumpeted it as a victory. The fact that a humpback whale had been dredged out for days by volunteers, corralled into a barge and released into the North Sea demonstrated a collective good will toward nature that can seem all too rare. On the other hand, the whale could still strand again, or die out of sight, and the insistence that he survive at any cost seemed wishful. “Oh, absolutely,” Strand replied. “I would say it was irrational—fuelled by belief and a willingness to try one’s best in the face of otherwise certain doom.”