Out there in the middle of the GOM, sometimes up to 200 miles offshore, we get all kinds of birds. When the fronts move through we’ll get clouds of sparrows circling around the ship. On almost every drill ship I’ve been on, the falcons move in to the derrick and terrorize the roughnecks. We also get tons of humming birds when they migrated - I don’t know what species, but they ranged from the tiny tiny green ones to the grey with a red throat? We’ll get pelicans hitching rides off the work boats, egrets, all kinds of stuff. Here are pictures of a falcon enjoying her pigeon breakfast on the bridge wing and an owl (barn owl?) that I’m sure hitched a ride out on a work boat. The owl pretty much terrorized anyone who went up to the bow.
We also picked up a homing pigeon in Ireland (he had a tag on his leg) and he stayed with us to the Gulf of Mexico where we (at the insistence of the rig manager - probably because we let him fly onto the bridge and he’d hang out with us and eat cookies) boxed him up and flew him to the beach.
I think you are right, Short eared owls, wish I would have taken pics. Beautiful birds. We have numerous bird feeders in our back yard. It is amazing watching the different species arriving to feed. The hawks await them is the sad part. I’m aware of mother nature, and ok with that. Who would have thought bird
watching was a comforting hobby, I sure didn’t. Love it now through my 7.50’s
Ha! Such a true observation regarding chicken, or any other animal really. It’s what we get for becoming so detached from the food chain and how our food gets to the table.
I have seen osprey nests atop ROS-30 LMSR’s. When there are two or three of them sharing one mate and a couple AB’s it makes it hard to keep up with these things, lol.
Was mate on an ECO AHTS during a summer night in the late 90’s and while our vessel was retrieving anchors during a semi-submersible rig move, a swarm of hummingbirds spent several hours on our vessel. Can’t say what type of birds they were but as numbers go, the vessel crew and anchor crew working during those hours estimated several hundred hummingbirds landed on the upper decks. It was especially entertaining watching the birds hover near the many, 1000 watt metal halide lights that illuminated the aft superstructure decks and main deck. Evidently the heat coming from those lamps attracted them.
I’ve had a few show aboard while well over 1,000 miles from the nearest land. We figure they got caught in a storm. efforts to revive them are not real successful and sometimes they take off again but land is too far off and they are sometimes pretty well depleted. also had one in the engine room, how they got past the fan blades puzzles me but they could of come down the fidley.
We’d often get birds to board when we went through the St. Mary’s River since there is a lot of forest. If we had fog crossing the lake, Superior or Huron, they didn’t know where to go so you could have a couple of dozen little sparrows or canary type singers hanging around by the unloading boom. Walking by it sounded like you were in the woods. Always wondered if they were puzzled by their arrival in Duluth or some other place.
In the early ‘80’s during cold weather we would find flocks of small birds (sorry, don’t know specifically what). Possibly wrens, chicadees, finches. That size. And soon after a pair of hawks would show up. It took them about a day or so to ‘clean up’. There would be piles of feathers, wings and legs around. Then they’d be gone. Happened usually when a strong cold front was coming across the US Midwest, driving the birds south (presumably to get warm). I saw this once in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago with small birds, but no hawks. Tried to leave pans of fresh water and bread crumbs out. (Sorry, fresh out of bird seed!). But they all seemed to die.
This was a visitor I had while at anchor in NY harbor. Stayed for about two hours. Some kind of woodpecker. Sorry. This new chat program lost the photo attach function.
