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The Sunrise

Powerful Owl

The Possum Assassin's New Address

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Photo: Greg Tasney / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Possum Assassin's New Address

Wake up anywhere along the east coast of Australia, from Brisbane down to Melbourne, and the deep double hoot rolling out of the pre-dawn dark might belong to the continent’s largest owl. The Powerful Owl stands up to 65 cm tall, with lemon-yellow eyes and a far-carrying woo-hoo. It is the apex hunter of the Australian night, and it keeps an unsettling daytime habit.

A Hawk in Owl’s Clothing

Start with the name, because it gives the bird away. Its scientific name is Ninox strenua, and both halves are doing some work. Ninox is a stitched-together word, half Nisus, the Latin for sparrowhawk, and half Noctua, the Latin for owl. Whoever coined it was flagging an owl built like a hawk. The second half, strenua, simply means strong, or vigorous. The label earns itself: about three-quarters of the Powerful Owl’s diet is tree-dwelling mammals, and it takes them whole, from sugar gliders and ringtail possums up to prey heavier than a kilogram.

The Owl That Sleeps Holding Its Dinner

A nineteenth-century lithograph of a Powerful Owl head and body with a separate study of its talon
The Powerful Owl under its old name Athene strenua, with a study of the talon, in a hand-coloured lithograph by Silvester Diggles after the bird artist John Gould (1877). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Here is the part that stays with you. By day the Powerful Owl roosts in deep shade, and it often does so still gripping the previous night’s kill, a half-eaten possum hanging from one foot through the long daylight hours. A 2008 study in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society found that only the three largest Ninox owls do this, capturing prey heavier than 600 grams at night and keeping it “draped below a roost for the entire day without being consumed.” The behaviour belongs almost entirely to breeding males. Researchers could not settle whether it works as a packed lunch or a territorial flag. Either reading rewards a bigger male, which may explain an oddity: in most birds of prey the female is the larger sex, but in the Powerful Owl it is the male.

Moving Into the Suburbs

For a long time this was a deep-forest bird. Then the suburbs filled up with fat, well-fed possums, and the owl followed the food. Powerful Owls now roost and breed in city parks across Sydney and Melbourne, hunting ringtail possums in the canopy and picking flying foxes out of the night sky. If you live in a leafy suburb on the east coast, there may be a pair working your street long after midnight. BirdLife Australia runs a long-running Powerful Owl Project that leans on volunteers to map where the city birds nest.

It is a strange privilege, having a predator this large move quietly into the neighbourhood. The Powerful Owl asks for old trees with hollows and a steady supply of possums, and where a city keeps those, it stays. Listen for the woo-hoo on a winter night. Something big is awake.

Sources:

AustraliaPowerful Owl

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