Mountain Tails by Sharyn Munro Page B

feet; we were irrelevant. After all, he was here first. We didn’t mind because he then ceased to wake us in the middle of the night, and no longer felt the need to mark his territory in our shower bag.
    The charm of possums faded for me at the same rate as their tastes developed for my garden plants, vegetables and fruit trees. In retrospect, it’s surprising how long that took.

NIGHT TIME IS OUR TIME

    In the late 1990s, one moonless winter night that I won’t forget easily, I was driven outdoors to head up the hill to our pit toilet. I’d hardly left the cabin steps when I heard harsh screaming coming from roughly that direction. I could only shine the torch up there in fits and starts, because I needed to illuminate where I was walking, to avoid falling up the rough steps cut into the bank.
    Reaching the track, I stopped and flicked the torch beam about, to see what was making those noises. I wasn’t at all sure anymore if I really wanted to keep going towards the toilet.
    On a low branch of the spreading white mahogany tree, one large light-coloured bird was perched, flapping big wings and screaming,while a similarly sized bird was frantically flapping in mid air just below it, apparently attacking. Between the two of them the racket was loud and sounded aggressive, but I knew, from koalas for example, that this could be a wrong, human-centric impression.
    Were they fighting—over disputed territory, a caught dinner—or were they mating? I started to move closer, to try to identify the birds and the cause of all the commotion. Used to shy nocturnal creatures like possums, I shone the torch directly on them. Big mistake.
    Sudden silence as their faces turned towards this source of interruption. A brief meeting with their round eyes, before a great pale rush of wings, as the one on the branch took off and flew straight at me and the torch. I screamed, ducked, and fell over, dropping the torch.
    Thinking they were about to attack me, I covered my head with my arms and yelled for my partner, who was cosily oblivious inside the cabin. I’d seen that Hitchcock film, The Birds! But they didn’t attack; having vanquished me at one swoop, they disappeared into the blackness. Just as well, for my partner remained oblivious—until I burst in the door, a babbling, shaking wreck who, unable to find the torch again, had fallen over twice as she stumbled downhill in the dark.
    Having later tried to identify them, I think they may have been Barking Owls, who don’t have the iconic owl face mask, and are said to have growls and ‘tremulous screams’ amongst their repertoire. It happened so swiftly that I couldn’t be sure, but these owls are sometimes called the ‘screaming-woman bird’.
    Whatever they were, their message was clear: ‘Mind your own business and stay inside at night. That’s our time!’
    Interestingly, I read that Barking Owls prey on magpies. Since I’ve always considered magpies the bosses of the bird world here, at least in daytime, I can’t imagine they’d be easy pickings; they wouldn’t give up without a fight. Maybe the Barking Owls’ screaming frightens them out of their wits—and nests?
    My usual experiences with owls are limited to a ‘mopoke’ call heard in the night or a regurgitated pellet of undigested food found on the verandah railing. I’ve heard the ‘mo-poke’ all my life: on the farm where I grew up, when we just called it a mopoke, and here, where I learnt that it’s the call of the Boobook Owl.
    We have Powerful Owls here too, and apparently Masked Owls and Sooty Owls, which I haven’t seen, but none of them say ‘Tu-whit-tuwhoo’ as storybook owls do. I have no idea how owls came to be associated with solemnity and wisdom, unless it’s their large staring eyes and surrounds, vaguely resembling spectacles?
    The contrast between Pooh Bear’s gentle and