An owl, according to folklore, can be a portent of impending doom.
And when a Barn Owl cut a white streak through the star-filled sky – just metres above us but in total, ghostly silence – it did appear to me like some spectral being.
But to the scurrying creatures of the night, peering out from their burrows or sheltering in clumps of grass, it must have appeared the angel of death himself.
For woe betide any furry critter who should be caught on an open plain when an owl glides above.
With its noiseless passage, binocular night vision and scythe-like talons, the owl is the complete killer of the dark hours.
Yet when mice populations explode into plagues, owls have a habit of turning up dead.
So, it would turn out with the bird I saw streaking through the night sky just a few weeks ago.
Since discovering that two Barn Owls lived on the Dugandan Flat just below my home in Boonah, I’d taken to walking my infant daughter in the twilight hours to try to catch a glimpse of the birds.
Like many others last Spring and Summer, our house had been overrun with mice and these ruthless rodent eaters at the bottom of the street seemed like guardians against another wave of the scurrying hordes.
I’d seen the owls a few times flying into and out of a gnarled tree in a corner of the park. And though I figured it was far more likely that their home was in a hollow in one of the towering Blue Gums lower down the floodplain, they were easier to spot on the smaller tree.
I often walked past it, hoping that if I become aware of the owls’ habits, my daughter and I could become their frequent visitors. Maybe give them names.
My Mum had done the same with me as a small boy to a Tawny Frogmouth that lived in the Bottle Tree outside our Brisbane home. We called him Oscar.
My family moved house when I was five and on the morning that we drove away for the last time, Oscar had left an Athenian Owl tetradrachm – a knock-off medallion flogged to tourists in Greece – at the base of his tree as a parting gift.
At least, Mum told me it was Oscar’s doing and I believed her (it wasn’t until years later that I learned of my parents' Greek holiday that the penny dropped).
We didn’t get to name the Barn Owls at Dugandan though.
Last week we found one in the middle of the day, spread eagle on the ground and facing the sky, not far from the tree it haunted. The feathers on its face and underside were pure white.
Even in death, it looked angelic.
Sean Dooley said there were three main suspects behind the death of that owl.
Two possible explanations were death by natural causes. The other scenario was a most unnatural killing.
Mr Dooley is the author of ‘The Big Twitch’, a book which documented his quest to break the Australian twitching record by seeing more than 700 birds in twelve months.
The National Public Affairs Manager for BirdLife Australia said Barn Owls “bred up quickly and were notorious for having big die offs in cold snaps”.
And there were a few frosty mornings in recent weeks in Boonah.
After the cold, history threw up two other suspects to the owl’s death. Both related to the mice plague that recently swept large parts of Eastern Australia.
In the Winter of 2018, Mr Dooley said there was an influx of Barn Owls along the coast of Victoria.
“They were turning up dead in big numbers,” he said.
Those deaths came after a plague of mice in the inland cropping areas of the southern states.
And as I was told by CSIRO mouse expert Steve Henry earlier this month, when an Australian mouse plague ends, it does so suddenly.
“The crash at the end of an outbreak happens in the course of a week or so,” Mr Henry said.
“Mice just literally disappear off the landscape.”
When the mice vanish, the Barn Owls go off in search of food. But nothing can replace their moveable feast.
However, Mr Dooley said something else might have been driving owl deaths back in 2018.
At the time, he did mention poisons that owls were ingesting when they ate mice as being a factor in their demise.
“But we didn’t really know enough about it,” Mr Dooley said.
“And, without conducting autopsies, it was difficult to say with certainty.”
Since then, a growing body of evidence has built to suggest that a particular set of mouse and rat poisons are having a devastating impact on birds of prey.
Not only Barn Owls, and not only owls in general. From kites to kookaburras, magpies to mopokes, it appears that there’s an impact on every bird species that can catch a mouse by what Mr Dooley calls a “silent killer”.
This week, BirdLife Australia launched a campaign calling on Bunnings to lead the way by boycotting poisons known as second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides, or SGARs.
Unlike first-generation rodenticides, SGARs don’t break down in the system of the rodent which eats it.
The anticoagulants cause the rodents to internally bleed to death, and in the case of SGAR poisoning, that takes days.
In the meantime, the poison has cognitive impacts, which cause the stupefied rodents to stagger around.
In this state, they are easy pickings for birds of prey, as well as lizards and other predators.
The SGARs can also have a cognitive impact on those predators, causing them to be struck by cars. Otherwise, they just kill the animals outright.
Last summer in Boonah the local hardware stores couldn’t keep up with the demand for rat and mice poisons. It was a story repeated across regional Australia.
The NSW government sought "urgent approval" to “napalm” farms with a SGAR called bromadiolone.
That request was denied by the Australian Pesticide and Veterinary Medicine Authority. But the same authority failed to issue a ban on the anticoagulants in a review it conducted last year.
Which means there are still five SGAR active constituents currently registered for use in Australia: brodifacoum, bromadiolone, difethialone, difenacoum and flocoumafen.
“There is no regulation whatsoever on them,” Mr Dooley said.
“And that’s really bad news for owls and all birds of prey.”
In the absence of government action or industry self-regulation, there are steps people can take to kill the mice in their homes and not the owls in their street.
These steps include removing piles of rubbish which can shelter mice and cleaning up pet food.
Many wildlife advocates encourage the use of snap traps over poisons.
Sometimes though, in the grips of a mouse plague, it seems that nothing can keep the household invaders at bay.
When I was tackling our mouse problem several months ago I looked into the environmentally-friendly recommendations and laughed when I read I should seal gaps in the walls and floors of my home.
We’d just bought a run-down Queenslander. It seemed more gap than timber.
Our snap traps filled every night. The bucket trap the internet promised would catch dozens of mice a night has caught a solitary mouse in the six months it has been under the house. I can only assume it took pity on my flawed bucket design.
In desperation I began to consider poisons. Fortunately, Winter came just in time and the cold did the dirty work for me.
But in Boonah, we didn’t experience a mouse plague like they did in much of inland NSW and up on the Darling Downs.
I can’t imagine the horror some of those people lived through, but I can imagine that I would seriously consider using poison to try to protect my home and family from plagues of mice.
In that case, many wildlife organisations recommend the use of the first generation of rodenticides.
“They are not ideal,” Mr Dooley said.
“But there are going to be far less deaths of things like owls if those poisons are used.”
All of which means I can’t know for sure what killed the owl at the end of my street.
But I do know it was far from an isolated case.
“There is a mounting body of evidence that [SGARs are] killing birds of prey all around Australia,” Mr Dooley said.
So my unnamed Barn Owl, it seems, was a portent.
Not one based upon superstition however, but one being revealed by science.
And there is nothing inevitable about the future of which this dead owl warned.