Sowerby's Beaked Whale

Rob Wil tweeted about a Beaked Whale dead on Lowestoft North beach. Working out it must be by Link's road car park given it was lying on a beach in front of a concrete wall, I drove down and seeing people in high viz jackets, I joined them. It was directly down from the NE corner of Link's road car park and was greeted by the very sad sight of a dead young Sowerby's Beaked Whale around 25 foot long, its head end was beaked. So sad to see such a magnificent creature as this stranded as a corpse along the tideline. The body had a few marks on it, but the chap there from the Institute of Zoology/ Marine Wildlife rescue confirmed my ID of a Sowerby's Beaked Whale and said it was a youngster probably got into difficulties with the shallow water. he said it had been seen alive on Caister-On-Sea beach last night and refloated and probably died from lack of food or ingesting a plastic bag (their usual diet is deep water jelly fish. He said there would be an autopsy on the beach sometime this afternoon. A much happier sighting was a young Grey Seal fishing and swimming north just out to sea and 18 BH Gulls in the car park. POSTSCRIPT: A post mortem on the beach was undertaken in the afternoon (I didn't attend) and confirmed it was a young female with an empty stomach so sadly died of starvation (not many deep sea jellyfish in this part of the North sea, sadly. In all likelihood this was one of a pair that got into difficulties off Caister-On-Sea (as previously mentioned) and were successfully refloated the evening before, very sadly the life expectancy of the other Whale doesn't look at all good). Lets hope it beats the odds and swims out into a deeper sea/ ocean where it can feed well.