Are the Powerful Owls What They Seem?

I had a gut-feeling to visit Sea Acres National Park on the Friday morning I was driving around Port Macquarie, not because I had a hunch, or anything like that, it was because I hadn't had breakfast yet and I saw a sign for their cafe and decided to check it out and feed my hungry stomach.

Sea Acres National Park

Koala sculpture just inside the door
of the Sea Acres National Park

I noticed that there was a koala sculpture just inside the entrance of the sliding glass doors, similar to the one outside the ABC radio station that was across the road from my motel room that I wrote about in the post in the link below -
424s Again
After a delicious breakfast and a coffee, I was having a look around the gift shop and noticed this mural painted on the wall pictured below.

I noticed an owl in the top right-hand corner of the mural and wondered if that meant there were owls in this park.

Then I saw this koala sculpture not that far away from the mural and it had an owl painted on it's right arm.

I also noticed there was a walk you could pay $8 to take just beyond the koala pictured above, so I took a peek outside and saw this white board with the message that owls have been spotted along the path.
And not just any old owl ... these were Powerful Owls, Australia's largest owl I was told by the lady on the counter, so I was in and paid my eight bucks to try and spot one of these powerful owls that I never even knew existed in this country I'd lived in all my life.
Maybe I was going to see my very first owl in the wild and not just any old owl, but the biggest ones this country had to offer.

The weird thing also was I was reading Strieber and Kripal's book, The Super Natural, which I had brought with me to read at night in my motel room, and it has an owl eye on the front cover of the book.
I'm actually still reading the book, as I didn't get that much reading in while on the road, as I was usually too tied to read at night and needed my sleep. 

Another reason I had decided to go on the walk was seeing the spiral on this poster at the entrance of the park, which to me is a very shamanic symbol, which I wrote about in this post in the link below as being the secret to the movie plot of The Revenant -
The Secret of 'The Revenant'
And I noticed the spiral was meant to represent an Aboriginal exhibition somewhere in the park.  

On the path to try and find a powerful owl?

The first thing I noticed on this walk was the sign above of a palm that is named after one of my favourite towns in Australia, Bangalow.

Bangalow palms over and above the path

This forest is ancient, and you can feel it when you walk through it.

A powerful owl?

Now here is something I only noticed just now looking at the photo above. 

The vine growth seems to form the shape of a hidden owl to me, and I was told this is the spot in the park that the owls hang around, which is among the Bangalow palms.

Do you see an owl shape in the vine?

Powerful Owl holding the back half
 of a common ringtail possum,

No wonder I thought this vine was literally creepy at the time;-) 

Then I walked into a big clearing and wondered what had happened here, as it looked like a spaceship had landed here or something like that.

I think I was letting the owl guy and his alien stories about owls get to me, as I walked alone on this eerily silent track.

Click on photo to make bigger to read

But apparently this area was made from a tree crashing over in a storm in 2013. 

Then I look up at the sky in the clearing and swear I see an owl in the clouds with two white eyes staring at me and its mouth open.
It even looked like there was a full moon behind its head with the white circular cloud formation around its head.

I snapped a picture of the cloud to see if I could capture my experience on film.

Just after the clearing is this open classroom with some rather eerie woodcarvings, including that owl chair right at the top of this post.

The eerier thing though was this place is called Bryce's Classroom and is dedicated to Bryce Laut who was killed fighting a fire, but the real eerie thing was these wooden sculptures were made by an artist named Stephen King.

I ended up walking the circuit without seeing an owl, but as I was about to exit, I heard some distant hoots, so I decided to walk back round again and exit through the entrance.
When I got to the halfway point there was a young kid making hooting sounds, but I didn't think his hoots sounded like the deep hoots I heard. 
Then I ran into a couple and got to chatting with them and found out that they were local owl enthusiasts who knew this place very well.

In fact, the guy who was telling me all about the owls that live here, told me he had about 300 photos of powerful owls and his partner was a painter, and she paints these owls.
I told him that he and his partner should sell prints and paintings, as owls seem to be the "in thing" at the moment.

Post number 80 on the path where the owls had been recently spotted

They told me also that the owls he been spotted frequently at present around post number 80 on the path, so I bid them farewell and went back to hang around post 80 for a while to see if I could spot one.
Alas, I never did spot one, although I had a feeling that they may have been watching me, but I'll never know for sure.

Shelly Beach, with the rain-forest canopy straight ahead 

The rain-forest canopy straight ahead

I went down to Shelly Beach hoping to see an owl with sleeping problems flying around the top of the canopy, but no luck here either.

Looking from Shelly Beach to
the hill with the obelisk on top of it

This was the beach that I saw the hill with the obelisk on top, not that I knew there was an obelisk on top when I first saw it from here, but I was curious to see if I could climb to the top of it ... because it was there, I guess -
The Port Macquarie Obelisk
The owl enthusiasts told me I might be able to spot some powerful owls hanging around in the tall pines at the old courthouse in town, as they had been spotted around there lately, so I headed off down to the courthouse after climbing the hill to see the obelisk. 

When I got down to the old courthouse, I found there the ugliest of all the koalas that I would encounter while in Port Macquarie.  

It had some kind of eye on the top of its head, or maybe it was meant to be a cap, or both?

Inside the old courthouse

I asked the people at the front desk of the old courthouse if they had seen powerful owls hanging around here, but the way they looked at me and responded to my question you would have thought I had asked them if they had seen any aliens around here.

The pine trees rumoured to be where powerful owls have been seen

Then a third person who worked there piped up and said some other person who was working there said they had heard hoots the other night outside in the carpark.
I never did see any powerful owls in the flesh on my road trip, but my crow and magpie guardians were rarely out of sight from me on my road-trip.  
(that's for another upcoming post. Update: linked in the link below).
On the Road with Corvids

But I did see the best koala statue across the road in the Glasshouse, a true work of art in my opinion.

This was my favourite koala of all the ones I saw in Port Macquarie.

There are even sacred kingfishers painted on this koala.

My photo of the powerful owl statue
in Canberra with the moon in the sky

Oddly enough on the following Monday in Canberra when I found the

owl statue that Halfasheep alerted me to in his video series 'All Roads Lead to Canberra', it turned out to be a powerful owl.

I wrote about the owl statue in my post about Barnaby Joyce and Johnny Depp and his dogs in the link below -
Barnaby Re(d)-Joyce-ing Over the Depp's Video?

There was also this tapestry featuring owls hanging on the wall in Parliament House in Canberra.

Maybe on my next trip back to Port Macquarie I will get to see a powerful owl in the flesh.

UPDATE:

The Owls Aren't There Anymore It Seems