During the night of Tuesday August 9 to Wednesday August 10, the beluga of 4 meters and approximately 800 kg was evacuated from the Seine. He was extracted from a lock in the Eure and took the road around 7:30 a.m. in the direction of Ouistreham in Calvados, according to information from AFP. Upon arrival, the cetacean will be installed in a seawater lock where it will stay for several days before being released into the open sea.
Tuesday evening, “more than 80 people were mobilized to extract the beluga from the lock in which it was stationed, in order to take it to a lock made available by Ports de Normandie and the Normandy Region in Ouistreham before releasing it into the open sea“, explained the prefecture of Eure in a press release. The operation, “particularly complex“, continued all night.
The beluga was finally able to be extracted from the lock at four o’clock and then placed on a barge “where a health check was performed“, indicated the prefecture. It confirms “the thinness of the animal“without determining the cause.”It bodes, according to veterinarians, for a poor vital prognosis“, alerted the prefecture. “We could see that he is a male, that he lacks a lot of weight and that he has some wounds“, had previously declared the sub-prefect of Evreux Isabelle Dorliat-Pouzet, during a press briefing at dawn in front of the lock of Saint-Pierre-la Garenne.
It was “longer than expected“, but “it’s a wild animal and it was a new technique, so we had to go step by step“, she recalled, welcoming the collective work of the divers, firefighters, gendarmes, zoologists and even veterinarians involved in the operation which had started Tuesday evening around 10 p.m. of Ouistreham has been made available to receive the animal, which will remain there for three days, “while we organize his repatriation at sea and observe his state of health“, according to the sub-prefect. He should then be taken to the high seas to be released there”far enough from the coast” and “let nature take over”she added.