Hunstanton whale: public urged to stay away from beach

On Monday morning, images from the beach in Skegness showed someone had spray-painted the letters “CND” on the tail of one whales, signifying the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Security guards are patrolling beaches onto which four sperm whales washed up over the weekend after the corpses were daubed with graffiti.

People have been advised to stay away from the beach since the bodies of the whales were discovered.

We are due to cordon off the area and later today an officer from the Zoological Society of London will be inspecting the animal and carrying out tests’.

Two more dead whales were also washed up south of the town after a pod got into difficulty in the Wash, which is notorious for its low tides.

The mammals were found washed up on Saturday after which coastguard rescue teams from Skegness and Chapel St Leonards were called out to cordon off the area.

“One whale was very similar to the one washed up at Hunstanton on Saturday and we think these were the other whales spotted with it”.

Many whales have become stranded across the North Sea in recent weeks, with incidents in Germany and the Netherlands.

“It is unknown where the rest of the pod are at this stage”, the MCA said Sunday.

Dr Peter Evans, director of the Seawatch Foundation, told the Eastern Daily Press that he believed the deaths are connected.

Marine experts believe that the whales, found near Skegness, had been following shoals of squid to feed upon.

He added: “They got into trouble in The Wash which is very shallow water and extremely hard to navigate”.

The animals were part of a larger pod, thought to have comprised at least six whales.

What happens after a whale is beached?

A fifth dead whale was found washed up on the Lincolnshire coast this afternoon (Mon) – on a former Ministry of Defence bombing range.

A sperm whale is stranded on Hunstanton Beach near the cliffs.

As the tide retreated, the whale’s struggles became weaker.

“It is possible that they were on the rocks and injured themselves as they managed to free themselves”.

A whale that was beached at Breezy Point in NY in late 2012 was buried in the same spot that it died because it was too big to be moved.

On Christmas Eve 2011, a sperm whale washed-up at nearby Old Hunstanton.

A warning was issued to visitors urging them not to touch the body, or allow their dogs to contact it directly, as it was decomposing on the sand.