Powerful, elegant and beautiful, the Tasmanian masked owl towered over admirers in its giant “cage” on Parliament House Lawns in Hobart during Dark Mofo.
The paper-and-wooden owl was roosting before taking flight on silent wings at the end of the winter festival.
The owl was the focus of the ogoh-ogoh showpiece at the event, honouring an ancient Balinese-Hindu purification ceremony. In this the “fears” of participants are written on pieces of paper and placed in a basket at the feet of an effigy, to be burned in a cleansing ritual.
The owl looked superb, expertly crafted by a team of Balinese sculptors. They had every facet of this owl in detail, from the brown plumage mottled with flecks of silver to the black-bordered, heart-shaped face, surrounding dark eyes.
The beak, as in the real bird, was coloured ivory and sharply tipped, the talons, pale yellow, scaled and fearsome.
The owl and the messages were later consigned to fire after a procession from the parliament building to the regatta grounds on the evening of Sunday, June 19.
It was appropriate that the endangered masked owl should be chosen for the ritual this year because it has been in the news recently with a campaign to save its habitat in the Tarkine of north-west Tasmania from a mining development.
The current plans to clear forest for a tailings dam are not the only threat facing the masked owl in Tasmania. Forests are being cleared on a wider scale and with them the old-growth eucalypts which provide the large holes the cavity-nesting owls need to build nests and rear young.
In more recent years a more insidious threat to the owls has emerged. This is the increasing use of more powerful poisons to kill rodents. The owls and other birds of prey are particularly vulnerable to what are termed second-generation rodenticides which kill in a single hit and do not build up slowly, and thus are not as lethal for predators.
Although officially listed as endangered, the masked owl is relatively common in the Hobart area, and can be heard some nights in the forested fringes of West and South Hobart, and Dynnyrne
The Tasmanian sub-species of the masked owl is distinguished from its mainland counterpart by its russet-brown plumage and bigger size and some owl experts consider it a full species. The masked owl is a member of the barn owl, or Tyto, family of owls made famous by appearing in the Harry Potter films.
I had never participated in the ogoh-ogoh ritual in the past, in which other mystical totems have been represented. But this year I couldn’t resist entering the giant tent housing the 10-metre-tall owl. I placed my scribbled contribution to the ritual into the basket, expressing the fear that, like the effigy, the masked owl might soon be no more.