Barn Owl in the backyard during the day - video and photos

Sometimes it is not hard to realise there is a new bird around place. The miners, honeyeaters, magpie-larks and bower birds were being very noisy, noticeably around the same tree. Eventually I spotted the visitor, although it wasn't in a great viewing spot to start with. At first I was sure it would fly away quickly, so I just watched it for a little while. It was a Pacific or Eastern Barn Owl.

As I watched I noticed it was doing this strange male 80s dance moves I remember from a long time ago. Not much feet or shoulder movement, just a bit of a wobble in the torso. Here is a YouTube clip demonstrating these dance moves, with a Bowerbird playing second fiddle for once.

I managed to get a few photos as well:

Pacific Barn Owl

Owlet Nightjar, Southern Boobook and Pacific Barn Owl

The weekend was a fairly good one for night birds. The Owlet Nightjar is much smaller than I had imagined, about the size of an adult fist when sitting on the road, or the size of a small rock, or some cow dung as I had assumed some of the lumps on the road were. I was alerted to the fact that maybe what I had seen was in fact an animal of some sort when one of the rocks "jumped" just before I past. I turned the car around and saw this beautiful little Owlet Nightjar:

On the same road (Buntine Highway) I also saw a Pacific Barn Owl. I have seen these before and on bitumen roads they sit and look straight at you, flying off at the last minute, but I had seen one just prior so was going quite slow in case there was another. Lucky for me, this one stayed long enough for some photos:

And the final night bird was seen in the early morning, during daylight, not a common sight for me - a Southern Boobook near Jasper Gorge in the Gregory National Park in the NT:

Happy Birding!