During a walk along Mowry Beach, a rocky and rose-bordered spot on the outskirts of Lubec, Maine, Chuck Kniffen and Rhonda Welcome watched their Saint Bernard puppy, Lola, worry a darkened patch of shoreline. It had become a regular occurrence in the fall of 2014. “She would stop and chew on this disgusting black spot that looked like seaweed or mud or dirt. And I would ask, ‘Why does she chew on that every time?’” Welcome recalls. “And Chuck said, ‘It’s a whale bone.
When a whale washes ashore, it captures attention. “Everything about whales invokes the imagination,” says Dan DenDanto, research associate and director of the fin whale catalog at Allied Whale, the College of the Atlantic’s marine mammal laboratory. “The thought of a big, hulking dead thing on the beach seems emergency-level or apocalyptic to some people.” The remains of a whale are not an emergency and don’t pose a risk to humans for the most part, but moving them takes time and money. It’s easier to get an excavator to a whale than to get a whale to a landfill. The people of Lubec buried the whale right where they found it, and returned to their lives. Now, 20 years later, it was making its return.
