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Burrowing owls enjoy Caribbean cruise after an early exit from OOTY
(www.royalcaribbeanblog.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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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:
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.
Between the 2 I feel one could be well guarded. Much more bycatch with the cats though if they aren't lazy.