Tweeters:
We've probably all heard of birds landing on ships and being transported, etc. I just talked with a fishing boat captain who just got back to Seattle who had an interesting experience. About 60 miles off the Pribilofs, an obviously worn-out BOREAL owl (the skipper knows birds!) landed on the deck. The deckhands took it in (they're used to having birds land on the boat), but weren't expecting it to survive. They fixed up a box to house it.

At first they didn't know what to feed it (fish was just pecked at), but one of the deckhands brought a dead fulmar in. The skipper cut off the leg and fed it to the owl, which "chowed down." So that's what they fed the owl for the next two weeks: fulmar parts. (Note: fulmars seem to be attracted to the lights of the boat at night, and the skipper said that one or two were killed every few days.)

At first skittish, the owl became quite tame. I asked where the owl was now, and the skipper said that they released it when they put in at Sitka. It flew off, quite a bit more healthy when it arrived.
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While in the Navy, I had many experiences with shipboard bird passengers. Once, while off Malta on a moonlit blustery night in April, I was on the bow when it "rained" yellow wagtails. It seemed as if every square foot of the deck was covered with these bobbing birds. In an hour or so, they flew off.

Another time, while off the coast of Vietnam, a rail came aboard. The engineering crew, appropriately known by all in the Navy as "snipes," adopted the bird and kept it alive for several weeks, ultimately releasing it somewhere near Singapore.
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Shipboard passengers, the feathered variety, can be very entertaining. The fishing boat skipper I spoke with yesterday said he'd had many such visitors, including short-eared owls, but never a boreal owl.


Denis DeSilvis
Kirkland, WA
Denis.Desilvis at PSS.Boeing.com

Denis J. DeSilvis
Proposal Development
Maritime Patrol
253-657-2160
Pager: 1.800.946.4646 PIN 1489042 (nationwide)
Fax: 253-657-1787
denis.j.desilvis at boeing.com