On a wing and a prayer
James Baker reports on the unlikely rise of a ghostly white predator believed to have hitched a ride to Aotearoa from Australia.
Kevin Matthews had found his holy grail. A member of the public tipped him off to the sound of a distressed animal and Matthews, a bird expert from Kaitaia’s Bushland Trust, set out to investigate.
Soon, he found himself staring at a ghostly winged figure at the foot of a puriri tree.
‘‘It was a barn owl,’’ he says. ‘‘I was ecstatic . . . it’s the holy grail for a birdnutter like me.’’
With a white front, cinnamon-coloured back and a heart-like face, he says tyto alba is unlike anything else in New Zealand.
But it was a sound in the tree’s branches that left him speechless.
‘‘There was another one . . . it was calling incessantly.’’
The injured bird below was its chick. On that day in 2008, the 64-year-old became the first person to discover a barn owl nest in New Zealand. He couldn’t believe it.
Yet the Australian barn owl has a record of visiting these shores.
Fellow bird expert Noel Hyde, 65, from the Wingspan Birds of Prey Trust in Rotorua, says the first sightings went back to 1946.
How they get here is a question that still baffles experts.
While they’re impressive distance flyers, it’s believed they wouldn’t make the 4163-kilometre journey across the Tasman Sea without assistance.
‘‘It’s thought that strong gusts of wind could have blown them,’’ Hyde says.
‘‘The other possibility was owls hitchhiking across on boats . . . you could imagine if you’re a tired owl on the ocean what better place to stop and rest?’’
But one of the most likely answers, he says, is also the most unbelievable.
‘‘The evidence points to some of them coming over in the wheel housing of a [Boeing 747] jet aircraft.
‘‘The theory is they’ve flown up into the housing at night. Next thing they know it’s taken off, and they’ve got a free flight across the Tasman.’’
The first record pointing to the stowaway owls dates back to 1984, in an article in the journal of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand.
The year before, in 1983, a schoolgirl found a barn owl exhausted and motionless on the grounds of Flat Bush
School. It died 18 hours later and was brought to the Auckland Museum. When it was examined, experts uncovered something odd.
Despite its exhaustion, the owl still had large fat deposits on its body, energy that should have been burned in a long-distance oceanic voyage.
And with a stomach full of Australian insects, the bird wasn’t an escaped pet.
After some investigation, the record states the team at Auckland Museum discovered the bird was found ‘‘almost directly in the line of approach of overseas jet aircraft landing at Auckland International Airport . . . and it is also at about the point where the undercarriage is lowered’’.
Hyde says the evidence for stowaway owls has also grown with time.
Further bodies have been found in jet aircraft wheel housing in California, the birds are often discovered roosting in engine bays, and in New Zealand, the few early sightings were often near airports.
Whether they blew in, sailed across the ocean, or became aircraft fare dodgers, the small number of owls that did make it to New Zealand did not breed, according to Hyde.
‘‘[They were] just alone in a vast new country.’’
But that changed in 2008 – the discovery of the first nest heralded the start of a breeding population.
‘‘So eventually what must have happened was Northland became a catchment for these arriving birds and eventually a pair found each other . . . so with plenty of food, nice climate, they started to breed,’’ Hyde says.
Since then both Hyde and Matthews have been working together tracking and documenting the fledgling owl population.
Hyde even adopted the injured chick discovered that night, naming the onewinged owl Tahi.
But in the years immediately following the discovery of the first nest, it looked like barn owls in the New Zealand wild would remain an oddity.
The single nest appeared to be a oneoff. Others couldn’t be found, and sightings remained non-existent.
However, in 2014 a nighttime excursion revealed the barn owl was
here to stay. Crouching motionless in the grass of a Kaitaia paddock, Matthews and Hyde sat transfixed as the evening glow highlighted the ‘‘ghostly’’ figures of a second nest as they darted back and forth on the skeletal remains of a fallen tree.
A family of five juveniles were playing tag, oblivious to the pair’s presence.
‘‘It was really something special,’’ Hyde says. ‘‘I was just in awe of their beauty . . . their immaculate whiteness, like giant white moths.’’
Now this scene can be seen all over Northland if you know where to look.
‘‘You still couldn’t call them common, but they now have a solid foothold here,’’ Hyde says.
Although it’s too early to predict a solid number, Hyde believes it would be safe to assume a population now in the hundreds.
And with the ability to lay chicks two to three times a year, he says this figure is likely to roughly double every five years.
‘‘They’re very adaptable . . . they’ll keep breeding as long as there’s food.’’
And as the numbers have grown, so have sightings.
From 1946 to 2008 there were 13 recorded barn owl sightings in New Zealand.
Since 2008, there have been 26, with six last year alone.
Earlier this month Green Bay resident Kathy McLaren told RNZ she stumbled across one of the silent predators in midhunt.
‘‘We just heard a real loud noise like birds, and we crept out the back door when we heard it to see what was going on and as I opened my back door there was this really small, little kingfisher-like bird sitting on our back doorstep,’’ she told RNZ.
‘‘And I look around to see what else is going on, and he’s flown into our window, and he’s a bit dazed, and then he eventually came right, and he went to fly away . . . and he flew back across our deck towards our back neighbour’s property and just as he was about to land on their roof – something really big came in and swooped in and grabbed him and was squawking and carrying on and then it took off.’’
Hyde and his team at the Wingspan Birds of Prey Trust have been collecting sighting information like this to form a picture of the growing barn owl numbers.
To confirm an owl sighting, members of the public are thoroughly questioned about its appearance and behaviour to ensure there’s no wishful thinking involved.
Even hearing its call will do, as long as you can accurately describe the sound.
But it’s not just the number of sightings that’s growing – the birds also seem to be spreading across the country.
In October last year, ecology student Lilith Fisher recorded the sound of a barn owl’s call on the porch of her in-laws’ house in Pokeno.
‘‘It was a prehistoric screeching,’’ she says.
‘‘That night I posted the sound on a Facebook group called native New Zealand . . . [Hyde] contacted me and said, actually that’s a barn owl.’’
For the next six months, Fisher took any opportunity to sit at that porch, binoculars in hand, before finally catching a glimpse of the pale-winged figure in March.
‘‘It was incredible . . . it was on the wing, quite large, gliding along before disappearing into some scrub.’’
Another Pokeno couple that did not wish to be named reported seeing an owl on three separate occasions during their time in lockdown.
Breeding populations have been confirmed in the Hunua Ranges, and Hyde says a lone bird has even been confirmed in the South Island.
‘‘They seem to be moving south quite rapidly . . . the juveniles can travel up to 200 kilometres to nest,’’ Hyde says.
‘‘We’re getting reports from as far south as Christchurch . . . Palmerston North, Bay of Islands, there have been reports here in the Bay of Plenty.’’
So what does the arrival of this colonising species mean for our existing bird populations?
Hyde and Matthews monitor seven barn owl nests to understand their behaviour and determine what they mean for endemic ecology.
Both men say their research to date shows there’s little need to worry. This winged raptor might be new to our shores, but they don’t seem to pose a threat to our native species.
While they do hunt small birds, their avian diet is limited mainly to other introduced birds such as finches and sparrows.
Even its little cousin isn’t too concerned, Hyde says.
‘‘They seem to coexist with moreporks quite harmoniously.’’
With a slightly different diet, says Hyde, the two don’t compete for food, which means no squabbles over territory.
‘‘In Northland, it’s common to find moreporks calling within 100 metres of the barn owls.’’
They may even offer some help in the fight against introduced predators.
‘‘They are literally rodent-eating machines . . . that is their main food source, and they are very efficient hunters.’’
And with a size two and a half times that of a morepork, and talons like ‘‘surgical knives’’ they’re much better equipped to fend off nest-raiding predators such as stoats.
‘‘They are still vulnerable . . . but if I was a possum I wouldn’t like my chances,’’ he says.
They’ve even been granted the status of ‘‘native bird’’.
‘‘That’s because they came here under their own steam, they weren’t introduced . . . and they’re breeding,’’ Hyde says.
But for those still worried Hyde reckons they’re an easy species to manage.
‘‘If they become a problem the wildlife act allows for their population control . . . which wouldn’t be hard.’’
And if you’re lucky enough to spot our newest native, Hyde and his team would like to hear from you.
‘‘Even if it’s just their call at night . . . it sounds like the word sheet, with an emphasis on the E.’’