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
Southern boobook boobook" in 1801, writing about it in English, before giving it its scientific name, taking its species epithet from a local Dharug word for the bird. The species description was based on a painting by Thomas Watling of a bird—the holotype—in the Sydney district in the 1790s. John Gould described "Athene marmorata" in 1846 from a specimen in South Australia; this is regarded as a synonym. German naturalist Johann Jakob Kaup classified the two taxa into subgenus "Spiloglaux" of a new genus "Ieraglaux" in 1852, renaming "S. boobook" to "Ieraglaux (Spiloglaux) bubuk". In his 1865 "Handbook to the Birds of