Friday, 10 October 2025
This story originally ran in our June 2021 issue. To receive our Australian BirdLife magazine, become a member today.
In the face of forest clearance and bushfires, the green spaces in our urban areas are becoming ever more precious for Australia’s Powerful Owls. Rob Clemens, Beth Mott and Holly Parsons report on the Powerful Owl Project, and the tireless volunteers who make it happen.
A loud, primeval whoo-hoo resonates through the night-time silence of the garden. It’s enough to raise the hairs on the back of the neck of anyone within earshot. We used to associate this distinctive call with the deep, moist forests on the south-eastern and eastern seaboard of Australia, stretching in a band from South Australia to south-eastern Queensland. But now it’s become clear that some of us are lucky enough to have Powerful Owls living in our own suburban backyards!
One of the things about Powerful Owls which sets them apart from many other threatened species is their ability to adapt to life in the city, where booming populations of possums, flying-foxes and parrots provide them with abundant food. Nevertheless, life can be hard for Powerful Owls, no matter where they live.
Ongoing and unexplained declines of many populations of large owls in Australia’s forests and the loss of more than a third of forest habitat in recent bushfires may mean that urban areas in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne which support Powerful Owls are becoming important strongholds for the survival of this species.
The species is considered threatened in each state in which it occurs (including being Vulnerable in NSW), and so requires targeted attention from land managers. Before the 2019–20 bushfires, the total population of Powerful Owls was estimated to be 8,000–10 000 birds, though we don’t really know how accurate this was, as our knowledge of Powerful Owls is lacking in many areas.
BirdLife Australia’s Powerful Owl Project is a citizen science project that is rapidly helping us fill in the gaps in our knowledge and understand more about the ecology of urban Powerful Owls, which enhances the conservation efforts to save the species.
The Powerful Owl Project maintains Australia’s largest database of Powerful Owl breeding territories and is one of the largest raptor-focused conservation projects in Australia. Thanks to this database—and the volunteers who collect the data—our knowledge of where urban Powerful Owls are is growing significantly. When the project was established in 2011, we knew little about the owls’ urban populations, and hoped to find 50 pairs in Greater Sydney, and perhaps that many in Greater Brisbane after the Powerful Owl Project spread its wings northwards in 2018.
Powerful Owls have adapted well to urban environments, and our volunteers are now monitoring over 240 Powerful Owl territories in urban New South Wales, while modelling indicates there could be over 950 pairs throughout the forests and urban areas of south-eastern Queensland—up to 19 times more abundant than we suspected before the project started!
Nevertheless, urban expansion and the resulting loss of key habitat features—especially hollow-bearing nest trees and roost sites—are massive threats to the survival of urban Powerful Owls. And although they achieve good breeding success in the suburbs, mortality is also high: being struck by cars and colliding with glass, buildings and electrical wires account for the death of about 15 per cent of the urban population each year. Further, because preferred nesting trees often occur within a narrow strip of vegetation—typically within 50–100 metres of the urban boundary, clearing and ‘management’ of trees and other vegetation associated with asset protection zones is a growing threat.
Citizen scientists are the beating heart of the Powerful Owl Project. Braving frosty winter nights, and biting bush bugs, their monitoring activities have created a valuable picture of what our owls are up to, building a database with information that is crucial for protecting this threatened species.
Using this powerful information, the Powerful Owl Project has been able to educate land managers and the general community about protecting and managing habitat to conserve Powerful Owls in urban areas and provide fine-scale ecological data about habitat use to advise appropriate land management practices. In addition, the Powerful Owl Project has continued to upskill and support informed, passionate and active community groups who are dedicated to supporting effective conservation for threatened birds—we have strong community engagement with over 1100 citizen scientists participating in two states.
Further, in the last three years, in Queensland alone, over 2,000 people have attended our owl talks, and media coverage has reached over a million people, which has allowed us to familiarise a large audience with forest conservation issues that affect our declining large forest owls
In NSW, the Powerful Owl Project provides information on owl-friendly land management to 17 local councils, the Rural Fire Service, the Department of Education, State Rail, power companies and the National Parks & Wildlife Service. In the last three years we have provided tailored education to more than 100 different community groups, schools and special interest groups and we are now working with both the Rural Fire Service and National Parks & Wildlife Service to ensure prescribed burns are managed in ways that cause the least harm to urban large forest owls. We continue to upskill and educate the community by developing weed and habitat management plans, supporting community groups and developing targeted training documents for land managers.
The Powerful Owl Project has made significant discoveries about the distribution of Powerful Owls and has begun developing targeted guidelines aimed at mitigating threats and guiding management to ensure strong conservation outcomes for birds and key habitat across the urban landscape. But there is still so much to do!
Moving forward, we hope our community engagement will evolve, including forming partnerships which will bring Indigenous knowledge of Powerful Owls to the wider community, and to deepen understanding of why Powerful Owls are such important indictors of ecosystem health.
On the research front, Team Brisbane has forged a partnership with QUT to set up passive sound recording devices to help find and identify breeding Powerful Owls. Remote acoustic monitoring may transform our understanding of where Powerful Owls occur, and whether pairs have bred successfully. For birds that take so much effort to find, this is great news for surveying, especially at remote sites.
In NSW, Funding from the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife has allowed us to begin addressing the question of how the owls move across the urban landscape, using genetic data collected from feathers they have shed. Results of the pilot study have found poor genetic diversity in our inner urban owls. With support from Ku-ring-gai Council, we are expanding this research to understand how developing green corridors might help foster better genetic health, by allowing Powerful Owls to move safely through the urban space. This, however, brings questions about the impact of escalating night lighting and noise into play, and we hope to address these urban issues and those around car strike in the future.
Urban owls play a role as biological controllers for many unwanted species, as, apart from possums and flying-foxes, they also eat rats, rabbits, foxes and birds like Noisy Miners, Rainbow Lorikeets and Sulphur-crested Cockatoos, which may be considered overabundant in some urban areas. An important factor in this ongoing analysis of diet is the finding that inner-urban Powerful Owls regularly eat rats. Given that rodenticides severely affect Southern Boobooks in Australia (and many other birds and animals overseas), Team NSW is keen to find out what impact these poisons may have on urban Powerful Owls, and whether this is a factor in the high rates of road trauma being recorded.
Away from the city, modelling the impact of the 2019–20 bushfires on three forest owls has identified fire events impacting more than 30 per cent of the total range. While we can’t be certain how much this affected populations of forest owls, we are certain that if frequent and severe fires are experienced again in the next decade or two, forest owls will be in real trouble. Further work is needed to better understand the role of fire in shaping the survival of Powerful and other threatened owls.
For for now, with the help of our ‘Owly Empire’ of volunteers and the support of our partners, we will continue to listen out for hooting and focus our conservation efforts to ensure the majestic Powerful Owl remains the nocturnal monarch of our forests, parks and gardens.
Voting is open for Guardian/Birdlife Australia Bird of the Year 2025. Vote for your favourite now!
Australia’s largest owl, the Powerful Owl, is in the running for Bird of the Year.
Australia's largest owl, the Powerful Owl has a wingspan of up to 140 cm. In suburban Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, they're usually seen round remnant bushland, where they face issues including lack of nesting sites and collisions with cars and windows. We're securing a future for Powerful Owl
The largest of Australia’s owls, the Powerful Owl usually inhabits the moist forests of eastern Australia. Its main item of prey is possums of various species.
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