LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The fate of an injured and wayward humpback whale captivated people around the world since March. The whale got stranded along Germany's Baltic coast. There was a dramatic rescue effort to tow him back to the Atlantic Ocean. But as NPR's Rob Schmitz reports, the story ended this weekend when its body was found off a Danish island.
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: The young adult male humpback, its mouth injured from a fishing net, had first beached himself off the German coast of the Baltic Sea in late March, leading to a local rescue effort by scientists. But in the following weeks, the animal beached himself again and again as he swam further east into the Baltic, and he developed a skin disease brought on by the low salinity of the Baltic, a body of water where humpbacks are rarely seen. Each rescue attempt garnered more and more media attention, where his survival became a cause celebre, and he was nicknamed Timmy.
BURKARD BASCHEK: Of course, we are also very emotional about the whale.
SCHMITZ: At the time, Burkard Baschek of the German Oceanographic Museum was leading the rescue efforts and told NPR, Timmy should be left in peace to die.
BASCHEK: And we know that's also expected and also the right thing in that moment to rescue the whale. We've done everything to do so. But the question is, to which extent?
SCHMITZ: But social media influencers criticized the scientists' every move, leading to threats of violence against scientists who said the whale was likely about to die. Others thought killing the whale might be more humane. At the time, Till Backhaus, the environment minister of the German state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania, ruled that out.
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TILL BACKHAUS: (Speaking German).
SCHMITZ: "We could harpoon it. We could poison it. We could put explosives into its mouth and detonate them, but all of these measures are unacceptable to me," he said. Backhaus did approve a plan by two German business moguls who donated nearly $2 million to coax Timmy into a water-filled barge in late April.
(CHEERING)
SCHMITZ: The 26,000-pound Timmy swam into the barge, and he was towed to the North Sea near Denmark. The rescue effort was popular in Germany, but it also caught the critical eye of political analysts, with one drawing a comparison between Timmy's plight and that of the German government. According to the miracle belief surrounding the whale, wrote commentator Nils Minkmar, this will end with him waving at the cameras as fit as Flipper. So, too, does the government want to steer Germany back to a golden age, he wrote. Europe's largest economy lies waiting on the sandbank. We, Minkmar wrote, are Timmy.
(SOUNDBITE OF WAVES CRASHING)
SCHMITZ: Over the weekend, two weeks after Timmy was released into the North Sea, residents of the Danish island of Anholt saw the carcass of a humpback had washed up in the shallows. Divers found a tracking device on its back and confirmed the dead whale was Timmy. He was found hundreds of miles southeast of where humans had released him, and he was moving back towards the Baltic Sea.
Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Berlin. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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