Protecting the Powerful Owl

They'd recently left their nest hollow and I was probably the first human they'd ever seen.

It touched me deeply.

It's a privilege because these Powerful Owls are described by Birdlife Australia in its Powerful Owl Project as "a giant of the continent's nocturnal birds of prey".

They are at the top of the night-time arboreal food chain.

Each bird eats a possum-sized meal every few nights and consumes gliders, large birds and fruit bats.

They need cool tree roosts and a tree hollow of more than one metre deep for a nest.

So, places without that food supply, shade and ancient tree hollows don't have these owls.

The Powerful Owls can live in cities such as Melbourne and Sydney.

The Sydney birds are being studied by Birdlife Australia.

What its work has shown is that an urban pair of Powerful Owls, on average, need 638 hectares, or 6.38km2 of space - equivalent to the size of 360 Melbourne Cricket Grounds.

This is a much smaller home range compared to the estimates for owls in forested environments, which need upwards of 2000-3000ha per owl pair (SWIFFT, 2020).

Many people assume that remote regional Victoria, where forests are still standing, will be a Powerful Owl stronghold.

Maybe. But nobody knows exactly how many breeding pairs are left.

We do know that the health of bush patches on farms, along road reserves and in Crown reserves is increasingly vulnerable to the accelerated compounding impacts of higher frequency of fires, land development, storms, heat waves and drought - and there is prey reduction impacts of feral cats and foxes.

One way that these threats to rural Powerful Owls can be practically reduced is by increasing the scale and connectivity of the hunting grounds they need to thrive.

This would mean they aren't evicted from big reserves when big fires come through - only to starve to death in the other fragments of bush already occupied by other pairs.

Sounds easy.

But, as I looked up at these two young Powerful Owls and thought about the 30 years of life they might have, it struck me that the funding to support that increase planting of wildlife corridors these birds need on private land is mired in red tape.

Victoria needs to rapidly increase the budget for Powerful Owl habitat on private land.

Wherever it is wanted at scale, is where it should be funded.

The greatest rapid uptake opportunity for that scale comes from neighboring agricultural businesses wanting to build carbon storage, environmental custodianship and increase climate resilience by planting native trees and shrubs.

These farm businesses need easy-to-get, flexible funding encouragement - not restrictive land title covenants, because these do not apply to participants in other private benefit incentive programs, such as solar panels, energy saver or LED rebates.

If Victoria is serious about preventing Powerful Owls from becoming a fading memory, the time to act for them and fund increased native plantings on private agricultural land in regional Victoria is now.

For further reading, go to: swifft.net.au/cb_pages/sp_powerful_owl.php or contact Lisette Mill at: gorseproject@gmail.com; 0411 33 03 21.