Training marine paramedics

The swan was a lone white dot, upright but unmoving, out in the middle of the grassy plain of the duach. It stayed put even as I approached, with the puppy at my heels.

It was a mute swan, standing in a daze with both wings drooping to the ground: the classic pose of an injured swan that has flown into power lines. There are no lines on the duach, or across the lakes, but the hillside is webbed with them: just looking out the window I can count 30 ESB and Telecom poles marching across the fields.

I don't know what I ought to have done: only what I told myself to think, which was that hundreds of swans die this way every year, tough luck; alternatively that it might sort of wander off on to the lake and sort of float with its wings out until it felt better (not likely). Either way, I didn't see myself throwing my anorak over its head and staggering off with the swan up the boreen.

None of this, of course, made it any better to find the big bird lying dead next morning, a skein of white feathers blowing in the wind; the puppy chased them. Sometimes, finding a dead swan, I have cut off the primaries at the knuckle - the wing makes a great duster. But that would have added insult, as it were, to injury.

So my Franciscan credentials are not all that hot, if I'm honest. The very last corncrake chicks in Thallabawn, proffered in a shoebox, were turned away from my door. Seal pups washed up on the strand have been left to wash down again. The one falcon with a broken wing turned up on a day when I had too much else on my mind. I do, in general, believe in leaving nature to its own devices, while sending a cheque now and then to the Irish Seal Sanctuary and the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group.

One time you can't just walk away from wildlife in trouble is when you're face to face with a beached whale or dolphin - worse still, with a whole school of them, gasping on the strand. As it happens, all my cetaceans have been very dead, but the last mass stranding, of 19 white-sided dolphins, happened only four years ago in Killala Bay.

Eleven kinds of cetacean have stranded like this on Irish coasts, most of them the small pilot whale, or various dolphins, but also fin and killer whales. There was a disastrous stranding of more than 60 pilot whales 30 years ago at Cloghane in Co Kerry. Exactly why they do it is still a mystery. Most mass strandings are of deep-sea species without experience of gently-sloping beaches. Some may chase prey into shallow estuaries and then get caught by a falling tide. There's also a theory that, like some birds, cetaceans may use the earth's geomagnetic force fields for navigation, and that these can undergo some local disturbance.

The Killala stranding seems to have happened because one of the dolphins was ill and the rest responded to its distress signals; all of them died, despite a lot of human effort to help some of them out to sea.

In the following year, six pilot whales beached themselves high on a rocky shoreline in Cork Harbour while another six swam in shallows. The stranded animals were kept cool for seven hours with seawater and seaweed and all were floated off when the tide rose again. It's to train a bigger corps of marine "paramedics" who know what they're doing that Ireland's first whale strandings workshop is being held next Saturday, April 18th, at the Bull Island Centre at Dublin's Dollymount Strand, starting at 10.30 a.m. It is being hosted by the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group, together with the Irish Seal Sanctuary and the Centre, with technical expertise from British Divers Marine Life Rescue.

The main task, carried out in realistic conditions and watched by massed onlookers, will be the refloating of a four-ton inflatable whale, using pontoons specially developed by animal welfare groups in the UK and New Zealand. The participants, recruited from the Garda, firemen and divers as well as ordinary whale-fanciers, will qualify for a "paramedic" badge, having paid £25 for the day. Thereafter, they will help pass their skills to local groups around Ireland, and flotation pontoons will be based at particularly sensitive areas for cetacean strandings.

There's also an excellent booklet of guidelines for tackling stranded cetaceans, Face To Face With A Beached Whale, available from the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group and the Irish Seal Sanctuary: something that ought to be kept handy, surely, at every Garda station around the coast, and be familiar to at least one vet in every coastal town.

It's no light undertaking to intervene in the fate of a sick or exhausted dolphin or whale. Trying to drag it seawards by the tail is just one thing not to do. Getting it back into the water could mean easing it gently on to a canvas and dragging this carefully seawards. Once in the shallows, the animal may need rocking, side to side, to restore its circulation. If it doesn't swim, or keeps coming back, it may need rocking again - this could go on for hours. Finally, guiding it out to sea could need small boats in tandem and ushers in wet-suits.

Even the best-intended help can end sadly. A few weeks ago, a striped dolphin and her calf swam into the shallow little harbour at Raghly in Co Sligo. Three men in wet suits tried to redirect them out to sea, but the animals persisted in returning. Eventually the mother hit the harbour wall, shuddered and died, and the calf swam away and vanished. There has been an unusual run of cetacean strandings on the Sligo coast: 11 in five weeks, mostly of dead animals and spread across several species. Concern about a similar spate of strandings was what brought the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group into being, and post-mortem examinations in UCC are part of its ongoing conservation study.

Contact Padraig Whooley (e- mail: