MATTAPOISETT — At around 5:45 a.m. on Tuesday, July 29, Mattapoisett resident Erin Carr and some friends were running along the Mattapoisett Rail Trail when they saw a man with his dog on the beach standing near what appeared to be a rock.

At the time they thought nothing of it, thinking simply that the man was going for a walk.

But when Carr and her friends turned around at the end of the bridge near Reservation Road, the man stopped them, asking if they knew anything about a stranded animal.

“We walked down, took our shoes off, went into the water, and as we got closer, we realized it was a manatee,” she said.

She added, “We were just kind of shocked to see a manatee in Mattapoisett. As far as I was aware, manatees don’t come up this far — they’re usually in Florida — so we were all just pretty stunned.”

The group called the Mattapoisett Police Department and when officers arrived, they ran back to their cars to grab towels in case they were needed to help get the manatee back in the water.

When the group returned to the scene 30 minutes later, the manatee and officers were gone. Upon calling the station, they were told the animal had swum off.

“I assume the tide must have come in a bit more and then it was able to swim away,” Carr said. 

The group found the manatee just three days after people reported seeing the animal near Popponesset Island in Mashpee on Saturday, July 26, which came as a surprise to Krill Carson, the president and founder of the New England Coastal Wildlife Alliance.

Carson estimated that the manatee would have had to travel at least 26 miles to get from Mashpee to Mattapoisett.

“He would have to go down the west side of Nantucket Sound,” she said. “He would have to cut through somewhere in the Elizabethan Islands, or go all the way around by Cuttyhunk, but it probably cut through somewhere and then found itself in Mattapoisett.”

According to Erin Burke, the protected species program manager at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, the manatee has a scar on its back, which confirmed that the manatee seen in both towns was the same animal.

While it’s uncommon to see manatees north of South Carolina, seeing them in New England is “not unheard of,” Carson said.

Burke noted that there have been four documented manatee sightings in Massachusetts waters over the past 17 years. Two years ago a manatee was spotted near Point Judith, Rhode Island, and the most recent sighting near Mattapoisett was in 2016 when a pregnant female was seen in Falmouth.

“An animal might get caught in the Gulf current or a current that brings it outside of its normal habitat, and that does happen to lots of animals,” Carson said. “The other thing is climate change. The waters around us are warming up very quickly, and so the animal might have been duped into thinking, ‘Oh, this is a good place.’”

If the manatee is a juvenile, it could also have been pushed into the less productive areas and outskirts of its habitat.

“This could be a juvenile that’s just trying to make its way,” Carson said.

According to Burke, the water’s temperature is currently within a manatee’s limits but that doesn’t mean this is a suitable location for the animal.

Carson noted that she has seen people comment that the manatee looks thin, which suggests it hasn’t been eating well.

“We don’t have really dense sea grass beds or mangrove forests,” Burke said. “It’s not the best place for them, and they often end up getting stressed and needing to be rescued.”

According to Carson, the sooner the manatee heads south the better its chances are of surviving.

“The animal’s running out of time as the water gets colder … the animal is going to have a hard time thermoregulating [and] staying warm,” she said.

She added, “Once they get cold shock, they really don’t have the energy to do what they need to do.”

The International Fund for Animal Welfare, a nonprofit organization focused on animal welfare and conservation, has been trying to monitor the manatee’s location to “assess the situation, assess its health and decide whether a rescue is necessary,” Burke said.

She noted that if the organization gets reports of another sighting or if the animal is seen floating in a marina, they will most likely rescue it.

Carson cautioned against approaching the animal if seen stranded or in nearby shallow water, noting that this can be hazardous for the animal and verge on harassing it.

“This poor thing probably realizes that it’s not in the right place, and it’s trying to figure out possibly how to get out,” she said, adding that running a boat around the animal and drawing a crowd could cause the manatee to stress.

“The last thing you want to do is stress an animal that needs to focus on heading home,” she said.

Carson explained the best thing to do if the manatee is spotted stranded is to stay at least 150 feet away and report the sighting to authorities, in this case the International Fund for Animal Welfare hotline at 508-743-9548, so they could monitor and potentially rescue the animal.

“That would be great if somebody could rehab it first, just check it out, make sure its blood levels are normal and then transport it down south and release it,” she said. “It’s a big ask, but it’s really what the animal needs.”