Category Archives: Powerful Owl

If this were the last day of your life, my friend, tell me what do you think you would do then?

I began the last year of the 20th Century celebrating the news that we were pregnant with twins. While the world was gripped by anxiety about the Y2K bug that appeared to threaten the collapse of computers, I was cocooned in my own little world and thinking of making a t-shirt “Y2 Kids?”.

11 years later, I’ve just finished the first decade of the twenty first century. Our 10 year old boys partied until midnight while I, more sedately, listened to stories about decapitated possums falling from the sky into backyards in Blackheath. As the clocked ticked us over into the next decade and the Rocky Horror Show’s Time Warp triggered a flurry of dancing, the juxtaposition of our pleasant social event against the real life night-time horror of possums being decapitated, reminded me of the relentless passing of time,

the fragility and cruelty of life and our amazing adaptability to normalise under almost any circumstance.

When the kids asked if they could go for a walk around the block, I didn’t realise that they were, in fact, facing their fear of what was happening. They were responding to descriptions of a giant flying creature decapitating possums by banding together to go to the nearby pine forest to see if they could spot it. This monster, as it turned out, is a Powerful Owl which lives on possums and sugar gliders and, as the largest owl in Australasia, has a wingspan of up to 140cm – pretty dauntingly big if you ask me!

Powerful Owl by Ben Cruachan Continue reading