For Colleen Dunn, Oct. 10, 2025, unexpectedly turned into a day she won’t forget.
The evening started like many others: a walk along the shoreline near Nehalem Bay State Park with her two dogs, searching for sand dollars. “Come on universe, I just want one. One sand dollar,” she remembers thinking.
Then she saw what looked like driftwood in the distance — until it moved. She suspected it might be a harbor seal pup. Knowing wildlife officials urge people to leave seal pups alone so their mothers can return, she kept her distance. But as she got a little closer, she realized it was a small shark, roughly 3 feet long, lying on its side and gasping for air.
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The shark showed no signs of injury. Dunn, unsure if it might be aggressive, sized up the situation for a minute and decided it was safe to intervene. She grabbed the fish by its tail and pulled it into a nearby tide pool, hoping the water would help it survive until the tide came in. The shark seemed to perk up.
But the tide wasn’t coming in — it was going out. Dusk was falling.
“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,” she said. “I just can’t be the one to allow something to die on my watch.“
She couldn’t bring herself to leave the animal in a shallow puddle. New to Oregon, she wasn’t sure who to call. She tried the nearest park office but got an automated message. She tried calling her husband; no answer. Wanting to share the moment — and to have something to show friends and family — she started recording video.
With light fading fast, she made a decision.
“He’s got to get to water. If he dies, at least like I did my part to help him get to the water,” she told herself.
She gripped the tail — “slimy sandpaper,” she described it as — lifted the shark to keep its nose from dragging, and ran it to the surf. As she swung it into the waves, it began to flop and stir. With each wave, the shark moved farther out. She watched for about 10 minutes until it slipped from view. The two dogs waited on the shoreline.
“Whether you’re supposed to do that or not, like, I just can’t be the one to allow something to die on my watch,” she said.
The next morning, Dunn scoured local social media groups for any reports of a shark washing back up. To her relief and surprise, she found nothing new.
Salmon sharks are common off the West Coast. They can reach 10 feet, be found up to 2,000 feet deep and are voracious salmon predators which attracts them close to shore in estuaries. Like their cousins, great whites, they can moderate internal temperature, which helps them handle different waters. They’re often mistaken for baby great whites but they’re basically just a miniature version.
Dunn’s salmon shark is the second found on the Oregon coast this year. Two months ago, a young salmon shark was spotted wiggling on shore in Pacific City; the waves eventually took it back and it wasn’t seen again. In 2023, Nicole Wood of Estacada discovered an even smaller juvenile salmon shark struggling at Rockaway Beach and got it back into the ocean.
Taylor Chapple, an associate professor at Oregon State University who leads the Big Fish Lab, said it’s common for sharks to wash ashore this time of year because they can develop infections that affect brain function and the ability to swim. Salmon sharks, like humans, are endothermic, maintaining warmer body temperatures than their surroundings. But some young sharks aren’t big enough to maintain “thermal inertia,” he said, and can get caught in colder water and enter cold shock. That can cause meningitis, leading to bacterial build-up in the shark’s brain and eventually killing it.
Chapple says that by the time a salmon shark reaches shore, it’s past saving. “It’s in such a compromised state that even if you were to take it back out into the ocean, it’s very unlikely to survive,” he said. “It’s best to let nature take its course.”
After learning the odds, Dunn said, “I don’t know if it survived, but I choose to believe he made it.”
