Thames whale: Concern for 'Benny' mounts as public rush to see lost beluga

The best result is that Benny goes missing, tingeing its continuing fame with sadness

They came from far afield: from across Britain and from media organisations across the world. They came by train, by car and even by helicopter, descending on sleepy Gravesend. They came and they stayed, peering through scopes and cameras through the day in hope of a glimpse of the animal

They came, some fear, to watch the whale die. But they hoped to see it live: splashing around the Thames for the first time ever.

Most of the people who arrived were birders, off the back of a slow year of twitching produced by the strange weather. Instead, they turned their scopes downwards and watched for the animal now known as Benny – a quick glimpse at the beluga whale that swam into the Thames and became famous around the world.

At first the beluga would only be seen as a flash: a glimpse of what one of the many TV news presenters said looked like a white inner tube. It could easily be mistaken for the white of a wave.

But then it would pop back up, and pop back up once again. After half an hour or so at the riverside, watchers would get used to the whale’s particular rhythm: hide for three to four minutes, then pop up three times, then retreat back again before beginning the whole thing again.

Conservationists hope that those brief moments of disappearance are when the whale is feeding. Belugas, unlike other similar species, are relatively happy in a river like the Thames; it might simply be that it has swapped its normal habitat of arctic cold for something a little warmer.

And they hope that the disappearances eventually become longer, as the whale makes it out to sea. Their hope – dashed the morning after the sighting, but still alive for future days – is that they will lose the whale, when it heads out into the North Sea and back into its natural habitat.

For now, there is little they can do but watch. Helicopters thunder overhead as TV news tries to hunt down the whale, despite the pleas of experts that the animal be given space. Volunteers from British Divers Marine Life Rescue spent the day tailing the animal as it popped up and down, hoping to check on Benny’s health and ward off any passing ships.

People look from the river bank after a Beluga whale was spotted in Thames near Gravesend (REUTERS/Peter Nicholls)

Benny might not be a long way from London, but Gravesend in Kent – and Tilbury in Essex on the other side of the river – are a far cry from the capital. The town, built on the shipping that still flows past the barges that have become Benny's marker, is quiet, and either side of the river is marked by long stretches of grassland that make it a quiet area, apart from the hum of helicopters and the chunter of passing ships.

This part of the Thames is a working river: those ships come regularly and they don’t do so with much subtlety. Vast trawlers regularly barge past the area of the water where the whale is, on their way up and down the Thames.

Benny has already made one journey past those ships, and has made its way past the vast port known as London Gateway to travel the 25 or so miles from the sea to the spot of river that has accidentally become its home. The overwhelming feeling among those gathered on the riverbank to look there was excitement mixed with sadness: glee at the chance to see the first beluga whale to make its way to the Thames, and the tragic recognition that this is where its pioneering trip could come to an end.

“I sort of couldn’t decide whether to come, because it is a little sad,” says one of those on the riverbank, as a fellow and more seasoned whalewatcher warms him not to be squeamish. But in the end the chance to see something he might never see again won out, he says.

For the birders who made up much of the crowd, that kind of ambivalence is common: they spend their lives looking for animals that aren’t where they normally should be. For some, Benny’s arrival is good news in that it proves the Thames has been so successfully cleaned up and regenerated that it could welcome even the strangest of visitors.

Spotting whales has this kind of morbidity built in, too, since if anyone has seen a whale before, it was probably dead. One experienced whale watcher describes the “moving” experience of seeing the three dead sperm wales that came ashore in 2016, and how their bodies were cut apart on the beach as part of the autopsy; another recalls the famous time that a young northern bottlenose found herself all the way up in the Thames in London, before dying of convulsions in front of the media’s cameras and the eyes of millions across the world, relating the experience of seeing that animal’s skeleton in the collection of the Natural History Museum.

It puts the conservationists and naturalists that are helping out with Benny in a strange position of wanting him to disappear and remain mysterious. If we ever do find out how it came to get lost – if there is something wrong with its navigation system, for instance, or if weather or something else entirely threw it off course – it will only be if it is inspected, which will probably only happen if it dies. The best case scenario is that we never see Benny again, and never truly know why any of this happened.

At the end of the day as the sun that has blazed overhead finally sets, the scopes are packed up and the watching crowd trudges the long walk back to the road. Benny seems to have none of the same instinct to leave, still splashing about in the distance amid the barges, huge ships and infrastructure of the river.