A family on the Princess Cruises’ Sky Princess found a surprising stowaway on their vacation.
According to the BBC, Charlene Halsey and her daughters found a “shivering” corn crake hiding under the step of a hot tub located on the ship’s 16th deck.
The corn crake is considered a species at risk of extinction by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. It’s unclear how the small bird ended up on the boat, but experts believe it may have taken a break on the ship while it was cruising through the Mediterranean, only to get stuck after it started pouring rain.
When Halsey and her children found the bird, they notified the ship’s crew and began routinely checking on the animal in its hot-tub hideaway. Eventually, the family moved the bird into their cabin for the night to keep it warm and comfortable.
“It was raining quite hard, and the poor thing was shivering. We monitored it for a while, and it was wandering around, seemingly unable to fly,” Halsey told the BBC about why she took the bird to her room.
The family gave the bird a proper sleepover, tucking the corn crake in a towel to warm it and naming the bird Aaron Burrd, in a nod to Aaron Burr from the hit musical Hamilton.
“It was very funny, playing with its reflection in the mirror and throwing my daughter’s hairbands in the air,” Halsey said.
An animal-loving family, Halsey and her children wanted to make sure the corn crake was taken care of after the boat docked in Portland, England, the following day. Through a bit of research, the group identified the bird as a corncrake and arranged for Derek Davey, a bird rescuer and rehabilitator, to pick up the bird when they docked in Portland, the Dorset Echo reported.
“Unusual call this morning from a passenger going on a cruise, they noticed a bird sheltering from the rain on the ship. The ship was going to dock at Portland port to pick up more passengers, so I agreed to meet them. The stowaway was a corn crake, a red-listed bird which spends the summer in Scotland and then migrates to Africa in the winter,” Davey wrote on the unusual incident on Facebook.
He added that caring for the bird will be a unique challenge as “it needs to overwinter somewhere and then be taken back up north in the summer when the other corn crakes return.”
Getty
Stock image of a corn crake
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Davey is taking good care of Aaron Burrd while he makes calls to find “the right place for it to go before being released when the migrating corn crakes return from Africa.”
“They are very elusive and not seen very often,” he noted of the “rare and important bird.” “I feel very privileged to have seen one but also quite nervous with the responsibility of looking after it.”
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