OCEAN CITY, Md. — Chuck Erbe knew dinner was over as soon as he saw the number on his ringing cellphone. There was a baby whale in distress. He told the waiter at Mio Fratello on Fenwick Island to bring a box for the pasta and headed for the quick change of clothes and the badge that waited in his truck.
By day, Erbe is a mild-mannered 72-year-old property manager, handing out pool passes and chasing down lost TV remotes for rental houses along the Delaware-Maryland coasts. But several times a week, he and his wife Ellen, a librarian, become marine animal rescuers, part of a vast East Coast network of volunteer first responders for the finned and flippered.
“They’re pretty used to us rushing out of restaurants around here,” Erbe said.
That night, the emergency was a motherless minke whale calf, just weeks old, beached off a backwater of Assawoman Bay. Ocean City firefighters were already on the scene, towing the animal to a marina where Erbe could reach it as tourists crowded around.
“I just held it” as he waited for a veterinarian to arrive, Erbe said. “I wanted it to know it wasn’t alone.”
Summer is a busy time of year for marine rescue. Migrating animals are on the move, hazardous boat traffic is up and beaches are crowded with tourists alert to any wildlife on the wrong side of the sandy line that divides their realm from ours. And whenever a sea turtle washes ashore or a manatee takes a wrong turn along the East Coast, a phalanx of volunteers, government agencies and nonprofit groups is standing by to help.
The effort, loosely coordinated by the federal government, responds each year to more than 1,900 stranded marine mammals and about 2,200 turtles. Similar networks ring the country’s Gulf and Pacific coasts.
Some of the animals are quickly released. Others are sent to rehabilitation facilities such as the National Aquarium in Baltimore, which serves as the coordinator of rescue efforts in Maryland. The less fortunate are dissected by biologists and then buried in undisclosed stretches of beach. Some, like the motherless newborn baby whale that couldn’t survive without its mother, are preserved for study.
“I get emotional just talking about that one,” said Erbe, a big man with a booming voice and habit of using military time to set up a meeting, of the little cetacean that died in his arms. “But we save so many. It’s a very rewarding thing.”
In coastal communities, marine animal rescue is a local affair, in which volunteers work side by side with real first responders. Erbe has waded into the surf with police officers in full uniform to fish a hurt sea turtle from the waves. Lifeguards, who get special training, routinely provide aid to sea critters in need. Part of their job is to keep curious beachgoers back from animals that are vulnerable and dangerous.
“Dolphins have teeth and are basically a solid tube of muscle,” said Jamie Falcon, a sergeant in the Ocean City Beach Patrol.
But sometimes the crowd can help. During a bottlenose dolphin stranding in 2013, Falcon helped build a shade canopy of beach umbrellas and directed a toy bucket brigade more than 30 tourists long, keeping the animal cool and wet for hours.
In Ocean City, even dogcatchers and trash collectors are trained to help with marine strandings. Public works staffers run the heavy equipment needed to hoist a dolphin or whale into the transport truck (or to bury it). And during a hammerhead shark scare in late June, biologists in Baltimore asked animal control officers to try for a clear photograph of the animal’s dorsal fin to help them narrow down the species.
“Everything is different every day in this job,” said Barbara Wisniewski, an Ocean City animal control officer for almost 30 years.
Animal-loving property managers, teachers, lawyers and retirees (lots of retirees) make up the bulk of marine first responders. The National Aquarium has trained a corps of more than 100 civilians in marine animal welfare to respond to calls from Delaware to Virginia. The facility also sometimes takes animals rescued in Delaware and New Jersey.
Virginia Aquarium in Virginia Beach, which oversees marine animal rescue in the Old Dominion, maintains a team of about 70 trained volunteers who staff round-the-clock on-call shifts. The team, along with aquarium staffers, responds to about 300 marine animal calls and posts more than 15,000 hours of volunteer service a year.
“There’s no way we could do this without them,” said Mark Swingle, the aquarium’s director of research and conservation.
Erbe has been volunteering in marine life rescue programs for 14 years. He came with a longtime fondness for animals and a family habit of fostering dogs and cats. “My wife always says the best thing about helping marine animals is that you can’t take any of them home,” Erbe says.
He had no experience with marine biology. But now, after multiple trainings and hundreds of response calls, he has deep insights into animal behavior (“seals can bite”) and a grasp of anatomy — inside and out. As part of the routine necropsy conducted on the animals that don’t make it, Erbe has stood inside a whale, cutting out cubes of blubber the size of ice chests.
“I’m not squeamish in the least,” he said. “That’s one of the job requirements.”
Typically, the volunteers make an initial assessment of the stranded animal’s condition, consulting remotely with the experts. For big mammals in distress, the aquarium will send a team and a truck.
Volunteers key in marine rescues
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