Tawny frogmouths take patience to appreciate. They will reward you with insights into their remarkable lives | Stephanie Convery

The most popular family in my neighbourhood is also one of its shyest. The adults, bedecked in a mottled silvery-grey, tend to fade into their surroundings. Their children are strange goggly creatures with saucer-like eyes, and usually well-hidden from passersby. The whole family keeps nocturnal hours. For those who know them, however, visiting at any hour becomes a kind of compulsion.

So it was for my partner and I when we moved to a new house and found tawny frogmouths in a nearby park.

Spotting tawnies is a bit like completing a crossword puzzle: it’s easier once you are familiar with the patterns, but there’s always the risk you’ll get stumped. Finding their hang-outs in the first place is often the hardest part – any lumpy tree branch could be a sleeping tawny – so it’s very tempting to take a shortcut and ask around. So tempting, in fact, that secret maps of tawny haunts have been known to circulate among birders in spring.

It’s no secret, though, that a pair of tawny frogmouths can reliably be seen at this time of year in a copse of natives along the fence line of what used to be the Elsternwick Park golf course in the Melbourne suburb of Elwood, now the in-development Yalukit Willam nature reserve.

When we moved to the area six years ago, the overgrown, decommissioned golf course was already a haven for wildlife and the community. Local birders told us there were tawnies in the park and then, out on a walk one day, I spotted one of them, squeezed between two branches, high up in a tree.

Tawnies are territorial and mate for life, which means if you see one there’s a very good chance another will be lurking close by – and that they’ll hang around for the long haul. As we set up home and put down roots, the rhythms of our daily life began to gently intertwine with those of the local birds. We’d pass by their trees on our evening walks, laugh at their strange expressions and, when they made a nest – to the great delight of the neighbourhood – we watched the chicks grow.

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Our tawnies like trees with knobbly bark where the foliage is not too thick. They have a few particular favourite perches. Sometimes they snuggle sleepily together and groom each other; sometimes they lounge a little way apart. In the presence of a threat (or a birdwatcher making too much noise) they go into log-mode, stretching out their neck in their best impression of a tree branch. It’s like a child covering her eyes and saying “you can’t see me!” – except that, if you aren’t already looking, the ruse works. Often, though, the tawnies just watch us watching them, the expression in their big yellow eyes ranging from indignant to sardonic to nonchalant.

Our tawnies nested in the same copse for three years – though calling it a nest is questionable. Sure, not every bird can achieve the architectural drama of a bowerbird’s podium, or the neat cup shapes made by fantails, but tawny frogmouths barely get points for trying. Sometimes they reuse the abandoned nests of other birds, but usually they just throw down a few sticks and call it done.

Still, it mostly seems to work. The first year, we were able to walk right up to the tree and see two little grumpy balls of white fluff peeping at us from over the branch. The next year, when the area was fenced off for wetlands construction, they handily chose a new nesting site in the fork of a tree that looked out over the footpath, where pedestrians could watch them through the fence. Despite one of their chicks meeting its demise by falling out of that tree in high winds, they returned to this nest again in the third year and made some improvements, including sprucing it up with fresh gum blossoms.

Shortly after the two chicks fledged that third year, though, a dead female tawny was found on the ground in the back corner of the park.

In an oft-told anecdote, ornithologist and tawny frogmouth expert Gisela Kaplan describes a male tawny that stayed with his dead partner for four days. He did not appear to eat or drink during that time and, on the fifth day, he too was found dead. Kaplan, in her book on tawnies, cautions against romanticising the behaviour of bonded birds, but even she acknowledges that on occasions like this “a question of their ability to grieve certainly comes to mind”.

The death of our local tawny marked a long period in which the species seemed to be absent from the park altogether. It was widely suspected to be one of the breeding pair, especially when no nests were found that spring. The loss of the birds felt like the loss of friends and our regular wanders through those trees took on a sombre note.

Late last year, though, a nest was spotted in a clump of cypress trees in a different part of the park and a baby tawny successfully fledged. When those cypresses were felled a few months ago to make way for more wetland works, the breeding pair moved again – back to their old copse, their old preferred perches.

They have been there ever since. And it’s brought a new purpose to our evening walks. At the time of writing, the tawnies have yet to find a precarious-looking perch on which to throw a pile of sticks and call it home, but we expect it. Any day now.