Plain Language Summary: Learning with Powerful Owls to Imagine Better Cities.

By Dan Parker, Kylie Soanes, and Stanislav Roudavski.

Read the full paper here.

Human dwellers and urban managers often overlook Powerful Owls (Ninox strenua) as fellow urban residents, yet these birds offer valuable insights for designing cities where all forms of life can thrive.

Powerful Owls are nocturnal, avoid close contact with people, and occupy large territories, making them challenging to study. However, careful study of their behaviours reveals awe-inspiring insights that foster solidarity and offer valuable ideas for design.

In this study, we examined coexistence between humans and powerful owls to understand how these two species can live together in cities. To explore human-owl coexistence, we spoke to and followed people who have spent years observing and caring for Powerful Owls. Through these interviews, we documented emotions, behaviours, and relationships that prior scientific studies have not covered.

For example, Powerful Owls reportedly “farm” land by allowing Brush Turkeys (Alectura lathami) and other species to live nearby. Brush Turkeys clear undergrowth in ways that help owls fly beneath tree canopies, and turkey chicks are easy prey for owlets to learn how to hunt. We reported stories of Powerful Owls mourning the loss of their young and expressing emotions that people can learn to interpret. They form relationships with human neighbours, adapt to artificial objects, and invent behaviours to live in the city.

Ideas from the interviews include creating gaps in vegetation to provide safe flying paths while providing views that people prefer, adding platforms for chicks to land on when they first leave the nest, and improving artificial nests through further research into owl perspectives. Crucial steps also include protecting trees, maintaining understorey vegetation, and ensuring access to water. We propose the idea of “citizen design,” which builds on “citizen science” by transforming community observations and knowledge into actions.

Our attempt to learn from owls confirms that planning and management can and should engage nonhuman beings as active participants. Cities play an essential role in biodiversity conservation, though they often fail to support wild animals effectively. Imagining a thriving city where human and nonhuman neighbours live together, even with frictions, is a valuable and achievable goal for urban design.