Centennial Park in the eastern suburbs of Sydney is where the rich and famous take their exercise, walk their designer dogs, and ride their horses. They park their Porsches near the stylish open-air café in the centre of the park; they workout with their personal trainers on the green swards. But Centennial Park is also for everyone: there are cricket pitches and goal posts on the wider expanses and plenty of picnic barbecues for big family parties. Lakes and patches of woodland, as well as open grassy spaces, dot the landscape. The perimeter cycleway is used much, much more than the horse riding track these days.
Most of the birds seen in the park are also quite ordinary and quintessentially urban – Noisy Miners, Australian Magpies, Feral Pigeons, Australian Ibis (locally known as ‘Bin Chickens’ after their scavenging habits), and gaggles of domestic geese and ducks, mingling in the lakes and ponds with native species such as Pacific Black Duck. Close observation, however, turns up a lot of good birds – the habitat is diverse and the size and location of the park, surrounded as it is by urban development, make it something of a magnet for birdlife. All told, 189 species have been recorded on eBird.
Undoubtedly, the most notable and famous on this list are the park’s Powerful Owls. So aptly named, this species of owl is an imposing creature. Its favourite item of food is no mere mouse or rat, but the Ring-tailed Possum, which is quite a meal. It also likes Flying Foxes, giant native bats with huge wings that are a familiar sight streaming across eastern Sydney’s skies heading for stands of fruiting fig trees. A large colony roosts in the park.
To a birder, the Powerful Owl is a celebrity wherever and whenever it turns up. They have become increasingly rare ever since European settlement as native forests have been reduced to fragments and the larger, older trees with the kind of nesting holes that these owls need have almost disappeared. Centennial Park has tens of thousands of trees, but only one that is known (by owls and people alike) to be suitable for a Powerful Owl to make its nest.
Birders prize any owl as a sought-after bird, but in Australia, Powerful Owls are uniquely prized . Simply put, they are huge. When I first spotted one (actually, there were three, including a juvenile) in the canopy of a tall tree, it was a shock to see just how big it looked. Owls are generally a bit shy and elusive during the daytime, disguising their presence on a well-chosen, mostly out-of-sight perch. But these owls were up there in plain sight. When not snoozing they were casually preening or lazily looking round. I was just another object due merely a casual, dismissive glance. Maybe the perspective from my lowly standpoint was distorting, but what most stood out was the giant talons, sheathed in orange, clutching the branch. With talons like that, this owl had every justification to be contemptuously undisturbed by the presence of a mere birder, hopping around down below trying to find a better angle for a photograph.
The fame of the Powerful Owl among birders is also, of course, due to its rarity. Every birder loves a rarity. They are rare in many senses: they occur few and far between in their traditional range, and increasingly so due to the rapid destruction of their habitat (they are vulnerable, getting on endangered); they are rarely seen because they are mostly nocturnal; and when they are found, they become local events in the birder’s diary – ‘local rarities’.
In the case of the Centennial Park Powerful Owls, this fame spread much more widely in the local population. It is fair to say that they became avian celebrities. Their looks, diets, sex lives and general comings and goings made the media headlines. And, like the Porsches, they conveniently parked themselves and took up residence right next to the café. The tree, the one and only that has a suitable nesting hole, is about 100 metres distant and in direct line of sight from the barista’s coffee machine.
The first headlines in 2014 announced the good news of the arrival of a Powerful Owl in Centennial Park . The ‘story’ was that this was the first official record. This was principally an item of birder’s ‘news’ – a local rarity to excite the twitching urge – but it was also deemed newsworthy more widely, probably for the charisma of the bird. City dwellers generally react positively to such local urban bird scoops. They provide a warm, fuzzy feeling and (these days) a break from the monotony of the gloom and doom of climate disaster and biodiversity collapse.
In addition, shortly after, it became apparent that there were not just one but three Powerful Owls in the Park, enjoying the feast of bats and possums on offer. Two of them paired up and the third was ejected – there was only one nesting hole and powerful Owls are apparently not polyamorous. This is when the public attention was excited – we now had an unfolding story line of the dramas of avian suburban family life.
Since 2014, this pair of owls has successfully nested and produced fledglings on at least two occasions, the first in 2018. Each nesting season prompts bulletins in the local press and on social media. Currently, the parents are accompanying one juvenile around the park – a second youngster went missing a couple of weeks ago (as I write). Speculation favours the culprit to be a fox, an invasive species that is now endemic across the whole of metropolitan Sydney. During the search for the missing juvenile a fox den was discovered and fumigated. No corpse or feathers of the bird have been found, which would most likely have been the case if another of the main dangers – collision with vehicles – had been the cause of death. Indeed, in a previous year’s family fatality, the cause of death was a cruising park vehicle at night-time.
The fate of the nesting attempts and the resulting chicks have been the dominant story line in the Powerful Owl saga since 2018. Tellingly, their domestic struggles and dramas have unfolded in plain sight. In the nesting season, around May each year, the nest tree is constantly watched and studied. This is Owl Celebrity Season. After eggs are laid, the female broods deep in the hole – it extends roughly a metre into the trunk of the tree – and the male roosts nearby. Birders with cameras hang around waiting for the perfect shot; park rangers erect a fence of plastic tape around the base of the tree and keep watch; visitors to the café stroll over to take a peek.
Dramas unfold after the chicks hatch, particularly when they appear blinking for their first glimpse of daylight, and then sally forth to be fed as the parents encourage them to explore the world. At first, the chicks mostly end up crash-landing on the grass, being able only to glide, and then clamber up trees using their talons. Eager watchers provide minute-by-minute Facebook updates on the blundering babies’ encounters with Magpies, Kookaburras and other potential dangers. The Park rangers may occasionally intervene to avert a tragedy. Once the young find their wings and can venture further afield, the family group leaves the nesting area and makes use of roost trees in other locations in the park. But they tend to remain close by, favouring a few trees that are only a brief walk from the café.
Thus it was that I stumbled across them. I was visiting Sydney for the weekend and decided to devote an hour or two on my last morning to see if I could find them. As is so often the case, local knowledge came to my rescue as I wandered around peering up into every tree around the café. Another birder appeared on the scene, and he pointed out the most likely roosting spots, as well as showing me the nesting hole. As a bonus, he also took me to the nest of a Tawny Frogmouth where the male was sitting on two fluffy bundles (maybe three?) and the female was snoozing in the next tree.
After my fellow birder left, I retraced my steps and tried the two most likely trees where the owls are often seen: ‘Try the tree near the beehives, but watch out for the the bees’, he advised. They were not in the fig tree over the beehives (although as a bonus it did house two Channel-billed Cuckoos) but in the next one, which lies inside the fenced compound where the busy park headquarters is located, with its tractors and mowers. From outside the fence, my shots were more than usually imperfect, as I was unable to walk around the tree, only to look up from a narrow angle through the branches. All three were in sight to varying degrees, although one stubbornly kept its back turned.
Fortunately, fame probably does not go to an owl’s head as much as it does for people. Hopefully, nor will the keen attention of birders and others trying to observe them be troublesome. Indeed, it seems likely that their celebrity status and our watchfulness are helping them protect their young, even if one wily fox at night had the upper hand. I like to think that from their lofty perch they rather enjoy watching us pointing and craning our necks from below. At least, they can be assured that we mean them no harm. They have done alright for themselves in finding a haven in Centennial Park.
