Hoo’s out there: Powerful owls hiding among Brisbane suburbs

Lucy Parker Paul and Dr Nick Hamilton became “owlcoholics” by accident, the pull proving too powerful to resist.

A female powerful owl emerges from its nest at sunset. Credit: Nick Hamilton

“We met near a pair of powerful owls that had bred quite openly in suburban Brisbane across a bike path,” Parker Paul explains.

“This was during COVID and a group of locals started coming out to watch these powerful owls nesting.”

A community of owl enthusiasts formed, and four of them, including Parker Paul and Hamilton, became owl addicts, heading out most nights to search for the birds in the suburbs.

Brisbane is home to a surprising number of owl species.

“You’ve got boobooks, barn owls, barking owls. They’re really fun, they actually bark like dogs,” Hamilton says.

And of course there are powerful owls, the largest owl species in Australasia, growing up to 65 centimetres long.

It was the powerful owl that turned Parker Paul and Hamilton from hobbyists to advocates.

“If you ever hear the traditional ‘hoo-hoo’ of an owl, it’s a powerful owl. They’re the only owl in Australia that makes that noise,” Parker Paul says.

By day, Parker Paul, a long-time birder originally from the UK, works as a primary education specialist. Hamilton, now semi-retired, is the former institute bio-mathematician at the University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience.

Powerful owls are classified as a vulnerable species in Queensland and NSW, and endangered in Victoria. Credit: Lucy Parker Paul

A great deal of their spare time is dedicated to birds, whether watching and photographing them, or volunteering with the Powerful Owl Project.

“It’s a system and science project that’s trying to map powerful owls around Brisbane and Sydney and see how they’re faring,” Parker Paul says.

Walking a track through Oxley Creek Common, one of the pair’s favourite places to bird watch, Parker Paul and Hamilton explain the methodology for spotting powerful owls.

“We’ve learned over time to follow clues,” Hamilton says. “If we’re trying to find owls in a new area, we’ll start off by looking at Google Maps and zooming in on satellite imaging to find big blocks of dense bush.

Lucy Parker Paul and Nick Hamilton have made important contributions to research, even noting previously unknown behaviours. Credit: Christine Beeton

“We’ll try to estimate whether people go there or not and if it’s got good slopes. Generally, owls like to roost on slopes near creek lines.”

Hamilton and Parker Paul have become experts at locating Brisbane’s powerful owls – and photographing them. Their Twitter feeds are filled with “powls”, some they have known since birth.

“Our families don’t really understand it,” Hamilton laughs. “They just sort of nod at you walking towards the door and go, ‘Owl club? OK, see you soon’.”

The enthusiasts are happy to give powerful owls more visibility and generate awareness around the dangers facing the vulnerable species but they never reveal the exact locations of the birds.

“There’s a tendency, if the information gets out, for so many people to turn up to photograph and see them, and [the owls] get disturbed and it interrupts their natural behaviours,” Parker Paul says.

“They’re extremely territorial,” Hamilton says. “They range over an area of six kilometres squared, and they’ll have favourite roosts that they’ve gone back to for years so if they get disturbed on those, they’re out of there. They’ve been known to abandon nests.”

Powerful owls need old-growth tree hollows to nest in. Credit: Lucy Parker Paul

A replacement environment is not easy to come by. Powerful owls need old-growth tree hollows to nest in, which are hundreds of years old.

The appeal of bird watching and spending evenings scanning suburban streets for owls might be hard to understand. But an hour with Hamilton and Parker Paul shows how rewarding it can be.

Pausing by an area of wetland, Parker Paul hands the binoculars over, pointing out tree martins, Pacific black ducks, a variegated fairywren, magpie geese, little pied cormorants and purple swamphens. Raptors such as white-bellied sea eagles, brown falcons, black-shouldered kites, even wedge-tailed eagles, are common here, as are jabirus, royal spoonbills, egrets and herons.

Back towards the track, a flock of rainbow lorikeets scream past overhead.

Further along the track, double-barred finches flit through scrub branches and a group of brown quails dart into the safety of the undergrowth.

A passerby alerts us to a spangled drongo by the creek. We shuffle down a dirt track and survey the trees until we find it, its black feathers catching the morning sun.

A powerful owlet spends its first morning out of the nest.Credit: Nick Hamilton

“There’s an awful lot of birds in Brisbane,” Hamilton says. “In Australia, I think there’s around 950 or so species and just around the Brisbane area you easily get 400.

“Sometimes can get 70, 80 species of birds just from an hour-or-two walk.”

“There are times you just stand still and think you’re in the middle of an aviary,” Parker Paul says.

No powerful owls are spotted on this occasion.

If Parker Paul and Hamilton are aware of any living around the common, they remain tight-lipped.

Lucy Parker Paul and Dr Nick Hamilton will deliver a talk on ‘Powerful Owls and Owl Detecting in Suburban Brisbane’ for Birds Queensland at the Merthyr Road Uniting Church on Thursday November 2, at 7.30pm.

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