SUFFOLK
They call him Wilbur.
He was the quivering porpoise everyone was trying to see but barely could because he was wrapped in a wet sheet in the back of a van with tinted windows.
Wilbur fit nicely back there – at 40 pounds and 3 feet long, he’s about as big as a toddler. Members of the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center’s stranding team huddled over him, placed wet cloths over his fins, checked his vitals, scribbled on a clipboard.
“He’s had a long couple of days,” said Wendy Walton, a veterinary technician.
Wednesday was another . A two-engine, six-seater Piper Seneca was parked a few feet away to fly him from the Suffolk Executive Airport to The Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation in New York.
Wilbur is not well.
Park rangers found him washed up on Cape Hatteras National Seashore on Tuesday. He was thin, with a lot of abrasions, as if someone had tried to push him back in the water. Which, said Joan Barns, the aquarium’s public relations manager , they shouldn’t have.
The stranding team retrieved him, keeping him afloat in a tank all night.
“He was not looking good at all,” said Doug DiBona, a volunteer. Then, “he spruced up.”
Walton piled foam pads and blankets on the right side of the plane, where two seats had been removed to make room .
George McClellan and Harvey Saunders took the front. They’re Coast Guard volunteers. Saunders used to fly hams for Smithfield Foods. Later, he ran an air taxi business and flew gamblers to Atlantic City, N.J. “That was the wildest part,” Saunders said .
The harbor porpoise was a most unexpected passenger. And it was the second one in about a year.
Orville was the first. “He was crying like a little baby. I reached back a couple times and patted him,” Saunders recalled.
It was time to go. “All righty, buddy,” Walton told Wilbur as she helped lift him into the plane. “Hang on.”
Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5555, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com
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