Maybe he's curious too

A Whale of a Tale on The Thames

The Times: [W]hen a northern bottlenose whale measuring around 17 feet and weighing up to 7 tons was spotted today heading upstream near the London Eye Ferris Wheel, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, even the most jaded Londoners sensed they were in the presence of something unusual.

"There have been dolphins and porpoises but we've never heard of a whale here," said Carla Redmond, 21, a disc jockey on a pleasure boat moored on the river. Experts said it was the only whale-sighting in over 90 years of formal records.

Thousands left their offices to line the river to watch. TV helicopters took to the skies. Friends exchanged text message photographs of sightings. At one point, in early afternoon, the whale seemed to beach off Cheyne Walk - one of the most fashionable streets in already fashionable Chelsea - and a man waded into the Thames, flapping his hands to get the whale back into deeper water.

"It's quite surreal," said a BBC television reporter as she bobbed in one of the flotilla of small boats that formed in an attempt - unsuccessful by nightfall - to herd the whale back downstream. ...

It evoked something of the magic that comes when one species meets another at close quarters - like sitting with mountain gorillas in Rwanda or stalking lions by open Land Rover in Tanzania. And it touched something, too, in the soul of a nation with a traditional fondness for waifs and strays. ...

"I think half of London will be out there trying to rescue it," said her husband, Michael.

I liked this quote the best: "I wonder why it's here, I'm curious about it," said a man on the Golden Jubilee Bridge who identified himself only as Sean, 43, a vendor of the Big Issue, a magazine usually sold by homeless people.

The BBC story made me smile, it's so earnest.

There's indeed something magical about this story; maybe just a reminder that for all our iPods, Blackberrys and urban metropolises, at root we're we're not that far removed from life on the savannahs. And every so often one of our fellow animals slips through to remind us of that.

Photo of whale swimming by Houses of Parliament by British Divers Marine Life Rescue, distributed by AP, via BBC News.