Powerful owls’ grisly crime scenes in urban parkland remind us we share suburbia with a magnificent predator | Wendy Frew

TThe air was clear and the grass still wet in dew when I came across what looked like a crime scene in my local park. The bowels of the victim were arranged in a neat line: a tiny intact kidney at one end and a small bloody mandible to the other, linked by a long intestines chain. Bandicoot remains? No, the fur looked more like opossum.

I had found remains of the previous night dinner, and the restaurant was one of the Australian predators, the powerful owl. Like a kind of bush bandit, he hunts at night, plunging silently before returning to the summits to dismember and devour his unhappy prey.

Imagile nights, I often hear his double hoa watershed. When I got home late, I saw her sliding in my street, weighed down by something heavy in his giant greenhouses. Its shadow once went over me at dusk in the same park where I found that the opossum remains.

While walking in the bush one day, I noticed that the bleaching and the regurgitated dumplings containing stuffed animals and bones – poops and vomiting the owl and vomiting towards the layman – and looked up in the trees to see the eyes with the wide eyes of an Owlet.

I should not be surprised to find so many signs of this elusive bird in the suburbs of Sydney, explains Dr. Holly Parsons, director of the Birdlife Australia urban bird program. The species has lost habitat in old forests for decades due to the land clearing.

“In the 1990s, it was rare to see them, but thanks to our powerful owl project, we were able to follow this passage from forests to urban spaces in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne,” explains Parsons. “They hold territories all year round and [when they find a partner] They stay there.

But there is another silent killer in these adopted territories, which threatens the powerful population of owls: the Rat poison.

Traces of poison used in rat and mouse baits were found in the liver liver liver. About 60% of birds tested by Birdlife Australia had enough poison to alter their behavior, and 10% had enough to kill them.

The bird conservation group is particularly worried about second -generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SGARS) because even if they kill the rats and mice they target, they also kill birds or other animals that eat a poisoned rodent. He wants the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority – which should end an examination of anticoagulant rodenticides next year – to restrict the sale of these poisons to approved professionals.

Until then, Birdlife Australia is looking for signatures on a petition in Bunnings, the largest retailer of Sgars, asking him to stop storing them.

“This is a critical period because once the decision has been made, it could be at least 10 years before the regulations were reviewed,” explains Parsons.

I checked my shelves – there is rat poison there. He will have to go. I prefer to live with rats than to lose the owls.