I can’t lie, Australian night birds are a nightmare. For reasons I don’t fully understand, unlike in the UK or USA, nightbirds in Australia (owls, nightjars, frogmouths etc) don’t emerge until it’s pitch black. That means you generally have to locate / identify them on call. Some of the bigger forest owls have huge territories across difficult to access terrain. We’ve done at least one night bird excursion each time we’ve been to Australia – sometimes two or three and almost always come away empty handed. Yesterday, encouraged by the weather (still, warm with a New Moon) and our enthusiastic grandson Jonah, we set off at dusk for a three hour session in the Watagans National Park, west of Newcastle. Our first stop fully met expectations and predictably failed to produce the hoped for Masked Owl. A couple more stops in the forest produced similar results – though we did hear BooBook, the easiest of the owl species to get. We were just about to give up at the next stop when we got a single response call from a Sooty Owl – the titan of tytos! We stood about for another ten minutes, staring into black space and hearing nothing but a few croaking frogs. Then, through my thermal imager, I found it surprisingly close to us, sitting on a horizontal bough. It didn’t like the spot-light and quickly but silently flew away. We all managed brief but acceptable views on the imager screen. Another five minutes of scanning and ‘bingo’ there it was again, watching us from the tree above. This time the light didn’t bother it and we were able to see its impressive features before it flew to another tree and eventually disappeared back into the night. They are battleship grey on the back, paler on the front with a typical tyto heart-shaped face and black eyes. They are approximately twice the body-mass of a Barn Owl. We arrived home before midnight – exhausted but elated. A trip, Hunter and Aussie tick.