Bill Franciscovich enjoyed the view of the ocean while biking down Highway 1. Sometimes, he’d catch a glimpse of whales breaching and feeding on the horizon.
On Thursday, however, he was greeted by a more macabre sight: what appeared to be a whale carcass floating toward the beach. A swarm of birds screeched across the sky, swooping down on the dead leviathan.
Franciscovich ventured down the San Simeon bluffs on Friday to catch a glimpse of the whale — and he could smell it before he saw it.
The carcass — bloated, sunburned and missing a flipper — was about the size of three Honda Accords, Franciscovich said.
“It’s sad to see, but that’s just nature. Sometimes you lose one,” he said. “Now, you’ve got the scavengers from birds to animals picking on that.”
The 61-foot fin whale washed up on the shore just south of the elephant seal beach near San Simeon, Marine Mammal Center spokesperson Giancarlo Rulli said.
The center responded to the whale on Monday afternoon and collected muscle and baleen samples for “diagnostic purposes and archiving,” he wrote in an email to The Tribune.
“The carcass was in an advanced state of decomposition and in slippery terrain with deep pools of water surrounding the whale, so a necropsy, or animal autopsy, was not possible to try and determine a cause of death,” Rulli wrote.
Though the center did not discover the whale’s cause of death, fin whales often swim in deep waters and are most vulnerable to ship strikes, he said.
The fin whale is classified as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.
Large bites were taken out of the whale’s abdomen, which might offer a clue to the cause of death, California State Parks Chief Ranger Eric Hjelstrom said. But a scavenger also may have taken a bite out of the whale after it died, which would offer a different explanation of the bite marks, he said.
There were no propeller marks on the whale that would indicate a boat strike, Hjelstrom said.
The whale washed up on a remote, rocky beach that is too difficult to access, so State Parks will not remove the carcass from the shore.
“We’re going to let nature take its course,” Hjelstrom said. “There’s a whole lot of biology out there that will take care of it.”
“One of the goals of State Parks is to provide a place for the wildlife to thrive, and the condors used to feed on large marine mammals on the beaches here,” he added. “That would be kind of a success story if we saw a condor feeding on this whale.”
Hjelstrom advised beach-goers to stay away from the whale.
“Stay back,” he said. “Nothing good’s going to happen if you get close to that thing.”
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