An Oregon woman taking a sunset stroll on the beach with her dogs ended up grabbing a stranded shark by the tail and returning it to its ocean home.
Colleen Dunn said she was walking on the beach in Manzanita, near Nehalem Bay State Park, when she spotted something on the sand up ahead.
“Probably about 15 feet in front of me, I saw something that looked like driftwood and then, I noticed it was moving,” Dunn told KGW-TV.
Dunn said she initially thought the object might be a seal pup waiting for its mother to return, but a closer look showed it was a shark.
The beachgoer decided to grab the shark by the tail and dragged it into a nearby tide pool.
“I had seen enough Shark Week to know to grab — if you can grab them by the tail, they can’t reach back and bite you,” she said.
The shark appeared to perk up once in the water, but it wasn’t quite deep enough to cover the fish’s gills, and it was unable to reach the deeper water with the tide going out.
Dunn grabbed the shark by the tail again and tossed it out into the waves, where it was eventually able to swim away from the beach.
“Like, I’m the type of person, if there’s a caterpillar on the trail that I’m hiking, I move it off the trail,” Dunn told The Oregonian. “I just can’t be the one to allow something to die on my watch.”
Taylor Chapple, a shark expert with Oregon State University, reviewed footage recorded by Dunn and identified the fish as a juvenile salmon shark. He said salmon sharks sometimes get “cold shock” when they end up in cooler waters and wind up beached.
