We got heaps of them in Upper Hutt. Quite often lying in bed i can hear 3 or 4 of them having long calling competitions (;o)

Love them. I live in Lower Hutt and we hear them every night. Absolutely gorgeous creatures and I love their noise.

Mid-January 2012, around 10pm, in a rented house overlooking Mathesons Bay up at Leigh, and in through the open window from the pitch-darkness of the forest into the brightly lit lounge swoops a morepork. The window is maybe 70cm wide and opened from the bottom perhaps 50cm, and this thing comes in perfectly silently without missing a beat, swoops once around the kitchen, scares my darling right out of her seat, then settles on the sideboard and glares at us. Gorgeous little black and tan pocket owl then tries to fly out through a closed window and starts getting a bit annoyed, flailing around and banging into things. We turn off the lights and open the ranchslider and after a bit more faffing, off it goes. Quite a magical experience - but what struck me most clearly (having had a few birds in houses before) was just how deadly silent this bird was. Amazing. Goosebumps every time I remember.

I'm another Hutt Valley boy who has grown up hearing moreporks all round, but rarely seeing them.

The first time I saw one, it was just a square silhouette against the dusk sky as it sat on the guttering of our roof.

The other time was when my partner and I were walking late at night along the street in Ngaio. We watched a morepork fly from one side of the road to the other, lit up by streetlights and landing on telephone wires each time. It had a huge wingspan and made no noise except a rustle. I still get the shivers when remembering it.

Ruru . . I love these little birds, I hear them regularly here in Hamilton,my first memory of Ruru is as a child in the deepest King Country, watching them swoop in on the doomed puriri moths which had been attracted to the light in the window - swift and silent, then gone.

I too live in Lower Hutt. There are a couple of moreporks which live in my backyard, which we can see at dusk sometimes. They don't just make the morepork call but make other calls too, it took me a while to figure out what bird was making the strange sounds at night.

We often see them around our house at dusk, but the closest we ever got was coming home late one night to find a morepork sitting in our living room! It felt like a real privilege to get so close to this fierce little bird.

We live near the Prince of Wales Park (Mt Cook, Wgtn) and hear them fairly often. A year-or-so ago we were up in the park looking for koura and kokopu, when one of the kids happened to shine the torch up into a tree directly onto a Ruru. That was pretty cool ... although it's a pretty easy sell. Owls are just cool in general and the morepork call is, like cicadas, the sound of home.

I live in the one of the inner city Wellington suburbs and our back yard accesses the town belt which surrounds our home on three sides. We have one in our backyard and I hear him most evenings. While tidying up recently I disturbed his sleep during the day and I'm sure he was louder that evening to make up for it. We also have tuis, kakas, wax eyes, fantails and rosettas.

We hear them every night calling across the valleys around Russell. Also a huge number of weka everywhere now and kiwi though more seasonal as well as kereru, tui, fantails and many small birds in our fruit and guava trees.