On the death of a whale

Newsroom

26-05-2025

One day a sperm whale landed on my doorstep. On March 17, 1996, one of the wildest, greyest, wind whipped nor 'wester days imaginable, with elephantine breakers crashing as far as the eye could see, three sperm whales stranded along the length of Paekākāriki beach. One of them beached directly below our seafront cottage at around 11am. My four-year-old daughter and her friend Rata spotted what looked like an enormous whale's tail poking up over the seawall. We charged across the road to find a gigantic whale, that uniquely shaped fluke aloft, lying on the beach.
News of the stranding spread like wildfire and the wider community quickly gathered on this surreal Sunday. It was a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus, or 'the big-headed blower,' parāoa in Māori, cachalot in French). It turned out to be one of a male teenage triad.
Our poor colossus perished slowly over several hours, collapsing in on itself as onlookers gathered, its tail occasionally whacking the ground, its blowing becoming weaker and less frequent. At one point, several strong men lined up along the whale's towering and slippery flank, perilously, futilely, trying to keep it aloft to protect its blowhole from being immersed, while the waves surged against them. A chorus of groans arose each time a wave hit, onlookers fearful that the men would be crushed as the whale rolled slightly at the mercy of the pounding surf. A woman with long flowing hair waded out and placed a bouquet of flowers on its nose.
Sperm whales may not be pretty, but they are unique and majestic. Their noses, which are up to a third of their body length, serve as powerful sonar instruments. Author and naturalist Kennedy Warne describes them as 'strange-looking animals. The blunt submarine prow, the narrow flaplike jaw, the puny flippers, the skin, as wrinkled and apparently ill-fitting as a rhinoceros's'.
It was tragic but extraordinary to view such a magnificent creature up close, although so cruelly out of its natural element. In Moby Dick, Herman Melville laments the impossibility of viewing a sperm whale in its entirety unless one goes whaling.
Further north lay two more parāoa. There were urgent discussions between DoC and Massey University's veterinary department about euthanasia but, in the end, the whales died naturally. After 'our whale' took its last breath around 3.30pm, diminished in size and spirit, we walked up the beach to see one of its dead co-stranders.
Dead by nightfall, our whale was the only one of the three washed out to sea overnight. Just as shocking as its arrival, and its prolonged, sinking death – its ribs slowly crushed by its own body weight over several hours and the waves covering its blowhole – was its disappearance.
Feeling a parental protectiveness over this dead teenage creature of the deep, I went out in the night to check on it. Still discernible then in the shallow, moonlit waves, by morning it had gone, but where? Experiencing something akin to grief, we marvelled at the power of the ocean to remove such an argosy. Indicative of the strength of the local tidal system, our cetacean's carcass washed up on Wellington's Mākara beach the next day.
Theories about the group stranding did the rounds. Had their navigation systems gone awry in the challenging storm conditions or were the others caring for one of their own who had literally lost their way in life? Was one whale sick or in trouble and did its distress calls cause the others to stay close as it drifted into the shallows, resulting in a mass marooning? Were these teenagers en route from the Cook Strait's dark canyons and deep crevices – the hunting ground for their favourite takeaway squid – to party lands in the Rauoterangi Channel that runs between Kapiti Island and the Paraparaumu / Waikanae coast?
Whale specialist Anton van Helden attended the strandings. He emailed me recently, and wrote, 'As adolescent males they are not strictly following a migration pattern and are probably just kicking around from place to place, so might even just have been reasonably local in Cook Strait or Nicholson Canyon, and following prey shifts through the area.' Apparently, males between three and 15 years of age leave the natal group to team up with other young males, sometimes leading to co-stranding, in contrast to mothers and daughters who stick together for life. Sounding a lot like humans, the male of the species becomes increasingly solitary as they age, tending to roam further afield.
With a touch of anthropomorphism, DoC's whale stranding database recorded their prior behaviour as being 'two whales seen to be 'helping' a third whale'. This altruism and herd instinct of sperm whales was often capitalised on by grizzled whalers of yore. Harpoon one and wait in the blood-thickening sea until others arrive to help their wounded comrade; then there would be the best part of the herd for the killing.
Sperm whales usually frequent deep oceanic waters. They are among those whales predisposed to stranding, sometimes in mass. Aotearoa, which sits astride the great whales' migration route on their seasonal journeys to and from Antarctica, is a global marooning hot spot. Marine mammal scientist, Martin Cawthorn, notes that New Zealand's west coast, with its lethal mix of wild seas and shallow ocean bed, is notorious for strandings. Studies suggest this might be due to how sperm whales navigate, which is through a complex clicking system called echolocation. This appears to not work so well on gently sloping beaches compared to steep, shingle boulder beaches or rocky coasts.
Our whale is now just a sad statistic: one of 189 sperm whales recorded beached on New Zealand shores between 1978 and 2004.
We were lucky the sea took our whale away. While agencies and iwi deliberated over the ownership, use and disposal/burial of their corpses, a distinctive, blubbery reek permeated the village's north end; some locals reporting retching on going outside.
'Our poor colossus perished slowly over several hours…' Photo by Faye Rodgers
A collective melancholy followed the whales' demise. Bad enough to witness their drawn-out death, but preferable to the past when they were ruthlessly hunted and harpooned in large numbers with the arrival of European whalers and their boats or occasionally carved up alive when beached by hungry coastal dwellers. In the 18th and 19th centuries, though, whales tended to be regarded as aggressive, fierce, even malicious, monsters of the deep, not gentle and tragic giants. A report in the Whanganui Herald gave a pejorative description of a whale which washed up in the same vicinity 80-odd years earlier, on September 10, 1917: 'A large whale drifted ashore at Pukerua, near Paekākāriki, last week and gave the Maoris who live in the vicinity quite a busy time for a few days. The huge monster was 50 feet in length and had a tail 12 feet across. It was dead when found and had drifted from some of the whaling stations in the Sounds. Millions of little blind eels came in with the monster.'
The 1996 Paekākāriki event heralded a new understanding among government agencies, NGOs, and iwi, by clarifying tikanga and protocols for future strandings. But the process was far from smooth. It took time for Māori (Ngāti Haumia, Ngāti Toa and Te Ati Awa Whakarongotai), DoC and researchers, to reach agreement on the handling and proprietary rights over the whales' oil, teeth, and jaw bones, traditionally used for carving. Mistakes were made, such as a poorly considered tooth extraction from one of the carcasses amid the tensions over what constituted correct tikanga, protocol, and government agencies' research wants.
While debates about correct tikanga and protocol carried on, DoC, the Kapiti Coast District Council and iwi sought an agreement on how to dispose/bury the enormous carcasses. Decomposing whales create a biohazard risk because of the buildup of noxious gases and bacteria, sometimes even exploding into blubber and body parts. But burial is often problematic, delaying decomposition. Current practice, where practical, is to tow the bodies out to sea to break down naturally in the marine environment; impossible with an up to 55-ton whale. So once iwi removed the jawbone, the stranded whales were cut up and buried or transported elsewhere for disposal. Small hunks of blubber were later found in the Wainui stream, while one local was flabbergasted at the sight of an enormous whale tale hanging off the back of a truck driving past his gate.
In 2013, the whale wrangle resurfaced after another sperm whale stranded on Paraparaumu Beach. Angry scenes ensued as the corpse was cut up on the beach. The traditional right of Māori to harvest the whale's taonga was pitted against the public health and emotional effects of a dissection, seen by some as 'butchering', in the public domain. A Kapiti Coast District Councillor called for a review of the 1996 protocols by DoC, iwi and the council, pointing out a lack of understanding of the spiritual and cultural relationship between coastal iwi and whales, and the need for local iwi to manage public sensitivity better.
My daughter's friend, the-then preschooler Rata, went on to become a Ngāi Tahu marine biologist with a research interest in the connection of Māori to whales. As for the whales themselves, and symbolic of the move towards personhood, local Māori named the three Paekakariki parāoa, Haumia Te Wai, Wainui, and Ruatau, our Mākara bound whale.
I used to be slightly sceptical about Save the Whales' selective speciesism, its seeming elevation of cetaceans over other animals. But to see a creature so magnificent, to look in its eye, feel its humanity, sense its intelligence, yet its helplessness, felt visceral. But just as real was its otherness, its ultimate, slippery unknowingness.