December 13, 2009 Tough year for dolphin strandings on Cape

(NECN: Alysha Palumbo, Cape Cod, Mass.) - It's difficult to watch these dolphins fight for their lives... stranded by high tides, harsh winds and cold weather at Campround Beach in Eastham, Massachusetts.

Rescuers from the International Fund for Animal Welfare, or IFAW, say they're finding dolphins stranded on the Cape almost daily.

"It's started to pick up, just in the last week we've had 15 strandings," said Katie Moore, manager of IFAW's Marine Mammal Rescue and Research Program.

She says strandings do normally pick up in the winter, but not usually until after Christmas.

"Certainly the Cape is famous for strandings, especially mass strandings," said Moore, "This may almost kind of be a mass stranding happening in slow motion where you have a large group of animals slowly coming to shore."

Moore says the weather we've experienced here in the Bay State recently has also hampered efforts to release the animals back into the ocean.

She said, "With all of this weather, the animals are stranding on an outgoing tide, so trying to find a safe place to release them with high surf conditions and a lower tide, it really limits the places where we can actually put them back in the water."

Moore says part of that may be due to the long arm of Cape Cod reaching out into the waters that these mammals travel through.

"The geography and geology of the Cape certainly sticking out as a hook into the ocean and it's kind of a trap, and it may be that some of these animals just don't make their way out," said Moore