Birdlife Australia's Powerful Owl Project continues in urban NSW, Queensland with help from citizen scientists

Conservationists are working with citizen scientists to ensure Australia’s largest owl is protected as it’s forced further into urban areas by habitat loss.

It’s estimated around 30 per cent of the species’ habitat was lost during the Black Summer bushfires in 2019-20.

“Estimates vary in how many birds we have left; we think somewhere around 7,500 across the whole range.”

In order to learn more about powerful owls and protect them, Birdlife Australia started the Powerful Owl Project 10 years ago.

It’s a citizen science project that originally focused on the Greater Sydney area and now also includes south-east Queensland.

Dr Parsons said knowing the location of powerful owl pairs meant measures could be put in place to ensure their crucial hollow-bearing nest trees were protected.

“We work with land managers — that’s local councils, industry, the state government — to make sure any work that has to happen in those bushland patches is considering the birds and is protecting them,” Dr Parsons said.

“They need really big old trees to breed in and they are sometimes the trees that are selectively removed from the urban environment, because they can be considered to be a danger.”

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The group seems to keep an eye out for the owls to find where they’re living so those areas can be protected. The good news is they’re finding more owls than expected, but the bad news is where they live are areas likely to get torn down. So the citizens report the owls to the conservationists, who then can work on getting those areas saved so the owls can repopulate.

Check out the full article for a bit more info and some more photos of Powerful Owls.

If you are interested in helping the Project: Powerful Owl Project website