birds making calls at night in Victoria

Introduction

camping in Victoria can offer you are surprising variety of bird noises and calls at night which can at times interrupt your sleep - bring ear plugs or headphones if you want to sleep!
there are a number of true nocturnal birds which hunt at night and are characterised by near-silent flight (thanks to combed feathers and other feather features) and large eyes, these include owls and night jars and related species
other birds are mainly active during the day but can be noisy at night, especially at dusk and within 1-2 hours of sunrise such as:
- kookaburras - often the first to start in the morning
- cockatoos

*many owls and nightjars rely on tree hollows to rest in - these take hundreds of years to form - hence, campers should take this into consideration when looking for wood for their fires

barking owl
- makes a woof-woof call
- drier woodland and forest type zones, often near creeks, but fairly uncommon
powerful owl
- one of the few Australian owls with a standardized “whoo-hoo” call which, is most often heard during winter months when breeding occurs.
- deep, double hoot: ‘woo-hoo’
- Australia's largest owl, feeds on possums and males can attack humans if they get too close to their nests
southern boobook / mopoke
- higher pitched double hoot (“boo-book” or mo-poke”)
- smallest and most widespread owl in Australia
- roosts in dense foliage or safely inside a tree hollow
Morepork
- these can come to Victoria from Tasmania in Spring
eastern barn owl
- often found in open country, farmland and woodlands and feeds mainly on rodents
sooty owl
- call is like a bomb whistle or women screaming
- dimly lit wet sclerophyll forests and feeds on arboreal prey eg. the Australian Greater Glider

Australian owlet-nightjar
- smallest of the nocturnal birds found in Australia
- loud grating chirr of either two or three notes, typically “chirr-chirr-chirr”
savanna nightjar
- open forest, woodland - from eastern and south east Asia that is a vagrant in Australia
- high pitched tweet
white-throated nightjar
- open forest, woodland, mainly eastern Victoria
- crescendo were-were rising in pitch and getting faster https://www.graemechapman.com.au/library/sounds.php?c=347&p=171 sound
- distinctive call at dusk that you can hear in season between November and February
tawny frogmouth
- most habitats except dense rainforests and treeless desert
- very deep, repeated whoo-whoo-whoo https://www.graemechapman.com.au/library/sounds.php?c=192&p=156 - sound

willy wagtails
- 30% make call during the night ¹⁾
- have a twinkling song, often described as sounding like they are saying “sweet pretty creature”
koel
- can wake people at midnight and are pretty hard to drown out
- usually arrives in Australia (esp. NSW) from Papua New Guinea and Indonesia to breed from late September to early October each year - but may not make it to Victoria although this has been happening more frequently this century

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