KAHUKU — A crane will be needed to haul a decomposing sperm whale carcass from the rocky shore here, delaying its removal, an official said yesterday.

The carcass was supposed to have been removed yesterday, but more equipment will have to be brought in to haul it off the lava ledge it has been resting on for nearly two weeks, said David Schofield, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration marine mammal response coordinator.

The whale will be removed by the end of the week, Schofield said.

The whale carcass was first spotted June 29 about 12 miles offshore of the Kane'ohe area. Sporadic reports tracked the dead mammal, which ended up on Eddie Rothman's 2-acre property in Kahuku in early July.

"We would have loved to tow the animal (while it was) offshore, but we always got the information after the fact," Schofield said. "It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack."

When scientists did find the dead whale, so many sharks were feeding that it was too dangerous for NOAA officials to attach a tow rope to the whale and take it out to open ocean, he said.

Yesterday, heavy equipment cleared a path for the whale to be hauled onto land. A Hawaiian cultural practitioner blessed the carcass, leaving a plume of ti leaves on a rocky outcropping above the whale.

"We're going to need a crane to harness the animal in a sling or series of straps," Schofield said. "We will haul it to land and remove it to a burial site mauka of Kamehameha Highway."

Officials said that towing the whale out to sea would not work as it would break apart and become a safety hazard to swimmers and beachgoers because it might attract sharks.

About a third of the carcass is missing, but it was still about 30 feet long.

A steady stream of onlookers drove to the remote site yesterday to look at the 8- to 10-ton dead cetacean.

The longer the carcass floats on the edge of the ocean, Rothman said, the more sharks it will attract.

"The whale is attracting open-ocean sharks that can swim for 40 miles," Rothman said. "They need to tow it out to sea, and the sharks will follow them out."

Before the whale is buried, scientists will remove the spine, the skull and the ribs so they can study the bones to determine the cause of death and learn about the population of sperm whales.

"They live here, and there is very little known about what a sperm whale does for a living, so to speak," Schofield said. "The bones are the last piece of information that could tell us how the whale died."

But officials said that's not why the carcass was allowed to beach itself.

"It wasn't because we wanted it for scientific research," said Wendy Goo, NOAA spokeswoman. "We could have taken our samples out in the ocean, but we couldn't get close enough to it safely because of the actively feeding sharks."

Ed Lyman, a Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary scientist, said that it's rare for sperm whales to beach themselves. But hauling away a decomposed animal is difficult without it breaking up.