The camera panned to the water’s edge on St. Simons Island’s East Beach in Georgia, where a row of short-finned pilot whales writhed, clicked and whistled as their shiny black bodies caught breaking waves in the late afternoon light on Tuesday.

“They’re going to die if they don’t get help,” said a woman’s voice on the video.

The woman, Dixie V. McCoy, who had her 2-year-old granddaughter in one arm and her phone in her other hand, recorded the scene on Facebook Live, capturing dozens of beachgoers and lifeguards surrounding the flailing pod of whales, shoveling water onto the animals with cupped hands. Some waded chest-deep into the water, Ms. McCoy said, despite shouts of shark sightings from the shore, to heave the creatures back out to sea.

“They were just so willing to help those poor whales,” she said. “It was a spectacular moment.”

In all, nearly 50 whales swam into shallow waters and as many as six caught in the surf were pushed back successfully, according to a spokesman at the Georgia Wildlife Resources Division, part of the state’s Department of Natural Resources and one of the first organizations that arrived on the scene to help with the rescue.