It’s believed that these playful creatures had swum up the river before being sighted miles inland. One passerby was so taken aback by the sight, he contemplated calling the fire and rescue service, fearing they might be trapped. “I walked over the footbridge, went to the other side,” walker James Moon told MailOnline. “One of the firemen was saying they’d got called out because they thought [the dolphins] had been trapped or they were in distress.
They clearly weren’t because you could see them surfacing and messing about, the two of them close together.” While some bystanders are convinced the swimmers were dolphins, others suggested they could have been porpoises – which are much smaller in size, but more common in rivers. Dolphins in the Thames aren’t a common sight, but they’ve made appearances before. Olympic swimmer Andy Jameson was gobsmacked back in 2017 when he clocked dolphins frolicking near Richmond.
It’s a massive turnaround from 1957 when the Thames was written off as “ecologically dead” due to grim pollution levels. Despite current gripes about sewage in our rivers and lakes, it seems efforts to clean up the Thames are paying off, with some marine life making a comeback.
