Property owners and town workers have no immediate plans to move or bury a deceased humpback whale that washed up at Richmond Pond beach on New Year’s Day, and is still there nearly a week later. Instead, they’ll continue to watch and see if nature takes it back out to sea.

The juvenile, estimated to be around 25 feet, washed in with the tide early on the morning of Wednesday, Jan. 1, and came to rest on the beach adjacent to the Westport Land Conservation Trust-owned Richmond Pond. Biologists from the International Fund for Animal Welfare came down Friday to perform a necropsy on the animal.

Though there was some discussion initially about burying the whale, Ross Moran, the trust’s executive director, said it was not very feasible as getting heavy equipment to the site proved difficult. He credited workers in the Westport Highway Department with trying.

“Very thankful for the highway department,” he said. “They tried. It’s a large animal and given the shoreline conditions, it was really hard without significantly sized equipment.”

Instead, he said, “we’re going to keep watching it and see. It’s better for the beach, and the deceased animal, if it can go back to the ocean anyway. Digging up the beach is not always ideal.”

This is the second time in two months that a humpback has washed up along a beach in that area. On Halloween, another juvenile came ashore at the Elephant Rock Beach Club, a few hundred yards to the east, and was buried there following a necropsy.

There was no word on the results of the latest necropsy, or what might have led to the whale’s death. But members of the town’s newly-formed Offshore Wind Advisory Committee took note of the beaching.

"Unfortunately, there’s been a clear and troubling uptick in whale deaths along our coasts recently," board member Christopher Thrasher said.

"While correlation does not necessarily equal causation, based on what I’ve learned about the potential detrimental acoustic impacts of offshore wind construction on marine life, I cannot say I am surprised."