Southern boobook age. Brushtail possums ("Trichosurus" spp.) and introduced cats and rats raid the nests for nestlings and eggs, and raptors such as the brown goshawk ("Accipiter fasciatus"), grey goshawk ("Accipiter novaehollandiae"), Australian masked owl ("Tyto novaehollandiae"), and probably powerful owl ("Ninox strenua") seize young birds. Juvenile southern boobooks are at greater risk after bushfires and have perished after being tangled up in dodder ("Cassytha") or bidgee-widgee ("Acaena novae-zelandiae"). The southern boobook generally preys on mice, insects, particularly nocturnal beetles and moths, and birds the size of a house sparrow ("Passer domesticus"). A higher proportion of its diet is invertebrates compared with
Australasian wren Australasian wren The Australasian wrens are a family, Maluridae, of small, insectivorous passerine birds endemic to Australia and New Guinea. While commonly known as wrens, they are unrelated to the true wrens of the Northern Hemisphere. The family comprises 29 species (including fifteen fairywrens, three emu-wrens, and eleven grasswrens) in six genera. As with many other Australian creatures, and perhaps more than most, the species making up this family were comprehensively misunderstood by early researchers. They were variously classified as Old World flycatchers, Old World warblers, and Old World babblers. In the late 1960s morphological studies began to suggest that