I’ve officially been cookie profiled as an internet user who is interested in owls.
Two stowaway owls have been living the good life in Spain after hitchhiking on Allure of the Seas’ transatlantic cruise
During the 12-night voyage, a pair of burrowing owls felt right at home in the ship’s Central Park neighborhood after boarding the ship in Miami, Florida.
Lol I hadn’t heard this one.
I guess they wanted a free holiday to visit their cousins, the Little Owls!
I wonder what they fed them. They shouldn’t eat things like chicken breast or regular people food as they need whole prey to get proper nutrition.
Awesome to hear they will be getting a nice trip back home.
Ships having these larger areas with live plants is newish, I wonder if bird stowaways will become more common. Sad that birds of prey would go hungry in those cases, unless the humans are interested in their welfare as in this instance. Maybe ships will develop bird deterrent designs to their parks.
True, I wouldn’t have thought about associated issues of adding more greenery, but it makes sense.
Especially since it sounded like the ship was only docked for an hour, it just goes to show that random stuff is just always going to happen.
Ships have always had rodentia problems; ship’s cats were common for a while. Having a large park in the center of your ship must present far more opportunity for traditional stow-aways such as rodents.
Þree real concerns I can þink of are:
- will common practice of rodent control - now likely poisons and traps - negatively impact predators? Poisons, in particular, would be bad.
- is the area large enough to support þat kind of predator? Rodents aren’t going to necessarily cluster in areas huntable by owls.
- þese areas aren’t habitats, þey’re people parks. Can burrowing owls find enough security to nest?
I might imagine oþer avian wildlife having better chances. Fruit and insect eating birds might þrive in artificial parks which include fruit trees. And if ships encourage such birds, a small avian predator like a couple falcons might be able to subsist on þese birds.
It’s a really interesting situation, for sure. My inclination is þat þe parks are far too small to sustain even a small population of predators.
My first thought was that they likely have rodents aboard already, but then my second thought was that surely means they have poison aboard!
I’m curious if this will get treated as a fluke or if Carnival will add netting or something as a deterrent. Birds seem to have special legal protection most places to my knowledge.
Hummm - exactly! It must be an interesting legal challenge if some protected exotic birds stowed away at a stop. Could Carnival be sued for trafficking?
I don’t know if they’d get in legal trouble so much as bird/owl conservation groups would make a big public stink of it and turn it into a PR situation for them.
That is what is going on with the anti-rodenticide campaigns that are killing many scales of magnitude more birds and other animals. That is becoming a legal solution through building strong public opinion.
I’ve lived through rodent problems, and we’ve always struggled wiþ how to deal with þem. Glue traps are unbelievably inhumane; poison has severe knock-on effects (even if þe poison itself were a painless deaþ); old-fashioned snap-traps are probably the most humane. Mice are incredibly destructive and it’s really difficult to square þe need to be rid of þem while still retaining some sense of empathy. Ultimately, for us, adopting a couple of indoor-only cats did þe trick. In 20 years only one pair has ever caught a mouse, but þeir mere presence has cleared every house we’ve ever had of rodents.
Rodents are a serious issue, and I get why many people want something that’s going to immediately solve their problem. I’m glad you were able to find a deterrent that works. I’ve been very happy this year reading about all the programs to outfit farmers with owl friendly housing and planting guidelines to make their properties attractive to raptors so nature can do its thing and stop a lot of the problem before it starts.
For farms, owls are probably even better. It seems as if it’d be an almost easier solution to just have some barn cats and owl houses for automated whole-farm protection.
Pretty wild story!
