Powerful owls’ grisly crime scenes in urban parkland remind us we share suburbia with a magnificent predator

‘On still nights, I often hear its sonorous double hoot. Driving home late I’ve glimpsed it gliding low up my street, weighed down by something heavy caught in its giant talons.’ Illustration: Victoria Hart/Guardian design

The air was crisp and the grass still wet with dew when I came upon what looked like a crime scene at my local park. The victim’s entrails were laid out in a neat line: a tiny intact kidney at one end and a small, bloodied mandible at the other, linked by a long string of intestines. Bandicoot remains? No, the fur looked more like possum.

I had found leftovers from the previous night’s dinner, and the diner was one of Australia’s apex predators, the powerful owl. Like some kind of bush bandit, it hunts at night, swooping silently before returning to the treetops to dismember and devour its hapless prey.