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Last modified on Sat 15 May 2021 05.37 EDT
The most charming thing about living in Orkney is the amphibious quality to daily life. One might mark the passage of the day by the movements of the ferry and the creel boats – one a sci-fi mammoth powering off over the horizon, versus the coming and going of merry little boats of blue and green, stacked with lobster pots and strung with bright buoy baubles.
Beneath the waves, the waters are busy too, with a changing cast of marine mammals. It can be difficult to keep track of our seagoing neighbours: a dorsal fin here, a tail slap there, and that’s all that might alert you to a passing pod. A landlubber like me could go entirely unaware.
BBC News
Published
A young orca has been rescued after becoming stranded on a beach in Orkney.
The 3.4m (11ft) long animal, thought to be a male, was spotted at Bay of Newark on Sanday on Monday.
Volunteers from the British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) charity and local residents spent more than an hour helping the orca.
They managed to get it into a position where it could breathe properly and eventually swim out into open water once the tide had come in.
BMLR said strandings of orca were incredibly rare and it believed the Sanday incident was the first successful rescue of an orca by its volunteers.