A KiwiRail crew and members of a coastal community jumped into action to successfully refloat a dolphin stranded half a kilometre from safety north of Dunedin.<\/p>\n
The Department of Conservation and\u00a0K\u0101ti\u00a0Huirapa\u00a0R\u016bnaka\u00a0ki\u00a0Puketeraki\u00a0responded to calls\u00a0that\u00a0a\u00a0terehu\/common bottlenose dolphin\u00a0had\u00a0stranded well out of the water around 3.45pm yesterday.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The dolphin had been left high and dry by a large low tide,\u00a0Doc Coastal Otago\u00a0Principal\u00a0Biodiversity\u00a0Ranger\u00a0Jim Watts said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy the time Doc and Project Jonah were able to get onsite,\u00a0about half an hour north of Dunedin, the tide had receded so\u00a0far\u00a0the dolphin was\u00a0more than 500m from deep water.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cLuckily, a crew from KiwiRail working nearby had spotted the dolphin in distress and\u00a0didn\u2019t\u00a0hesitate to spring into action, lugging buckets of water to keep the dolphin wet for\u00a0almost an\u00a0hour.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce Doc and\u00a0Project Jonah were onsite, we were able to mobilise the growing group of community volunteers, including the\u00a0Warrington\u00a0Surf\u00a0Life\u00a0Saving\u00a0Club and\u00a0K\u0101ti\u00a0Huirapa\u00a0R\u016bnaka\u00a0ki\u00a0Puketeraki\u00a0and work together to safely get this dolphin back in the sea where it belongs.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The KiwiRail team\u00a0also supported with the\u00a0use of a\u00a0Hiab\u00a0to help\u00a0carefully\u00a0lift the dolphin\u00a0onto the back of a\u00a0ute.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u00a0was driven to nearby Doctors Point, where the dolphin was successfully refloated.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThanks to the quick-thinking from the local community and KiwiRail, we were able to have a successful outcome.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople showed up with buckets, spades, sheets, towels and muscles and together we managed to successfully refloat the dolphin around 6.30pm.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The dolphin was last seen by the Surf Life\u00a0Saving boat swimming a couple hundred meters beyond the sand bar and heading out to sea.\u00a0<\/p>\n
– Allied Media<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A KiwiRail crew and members of a coastal community jumped into action to successfully refloat a dolphin stranded…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":179651,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":{"0":"post-179650","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}