News item: An owl is discovered on board the Oasis of the Seas, parked near the artificial grass of the golf course on an upper deck. The burrowing owl was captured by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, removed from the ship and released into the wild.
We’ve had a burrowing owl in our life. Two of them, actually.
One of them we “adopted” at The Living Desert in California…full disclosure: The adoption was a Christmas gift from our son and daughter-in-law. But we did renew the adoption papers for another year and then, feeling a little jilted because he never seemed to recognize us on our visits, we let him go. The official position is he just grew up.
The other Burrowing Owl was a bottle of wine, purchased at a winery of the same name in Canada, in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. If it’s not the premier red wine producer in the “Napa Valley of the North” it’s certainly close, and today we have a few bottles with an owl on the label that under no conditions will be “released to the wild.”
So, while we don’t qualify as burrowing owl experts, we have at least a soft spot for the one who “went golfing” on the Oasis. Because he was caught (in a net) prior to the ship’s departure, he never got to see the waters of the Caribbean, never got to know what it’s like to live in the Central Park where it never snows.
The conservation official (Lt. Dave Bingham) who caught the owl put it this way, in an interview yesterday with the Miami Herald: “When I let [her] go she turned around and looked at me with this death stare. I don’t know if she was trying to say ‘I’m going to eat you’ or ‘Thanks for taking away my chances of staying on that cruise.'”