On Monday the 40-strong Fijian choir was strikingly clad in costumes of aquamarine (perhaps suggesting the pellucid South Pacific that laps Fiji's shores). In the cavernous but acoustically well-blessed Great Hall the Kadavu Choir performed its Christmas carols and other festive and soothing Christian songs. The sinful parliamentary year is only just over and one could almost feel the choir's Christian singings going out from the Great Hall and coursing through the premises like a legion of acoustic exorcists, driving out the year's demons, cleaning away the drifts of a year's lies and skulduggeries. Surely that was why Parliament House's administrators had invited the choir of Methodists, and at this time, the very first weekday after parliament's rising.

We were too shy to put that perhaps controversial analysis to the choir's chairman Mr Ratuvuki. Instead we asked him to tell us all about his choir.

He explains that the Suva-based choir was formed in 1979 and has been in continuous existence ever since, with, of course, ever replenishing recruits of new choristers. They are all Methodists and on the third Sunday of every month they take part in a church service somewhere in the province. This church service is a tradition now, begun in the 1970s and after punishing cyclones that killed people and ravaged homes. The services were instituted to, in his words, "achieve security [against cyclones] from the Father in Heaven".

Yes, and it is hard to imagine God, famously appreciative of fine music, being able to ignore a church service involving the Kadavu Choir. On Monday their singing was very, very beautiful, sometimes passionate and exuberant (oodles of happy hallelujahs) but always at the same time polished and disciplined.

Their complex version of Jingle Bells (a little eccentric for a choir of folk who cannot possibly know, in Fiji, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh) was enormous fun. Their Go, tell it on the mountain, Lord was rapturous and had the atheists among us envying the happy choristers the boon of the faith brought to them so long ago by Methodist missionaries.

Then the male choristers, left alone in the great space beneath and in front of Arthur Boyd's terrific Great Hall tapestry, sang movingly about their brother Joseph's plight as he walked towards Bethlehem.

All of this Christian loveliness seemed to us to put the cleaners through hitherto politics-begrimed Parliament House.

There were times during the choir's concert when we felt like going "Woo-hoo!", today's preferred expression of enthusiasm. And in an eerie coincidence "woo-hoo" is the way HANZAB, the bible of Australasian ornithological scholarship, describes the call of the Powerful Owl.

As reported here last week by another columnist there is a Powerful Owl at large and giving great excitement in and around Haig Park in inner Canberra, not a thousand miles from the sacred sites of the Turner Tennis Club and the North Canberra Bowling Club. An owl-eyed bird/bowler Terry Munro saw some dramatically different droppings and from that clue started looking up. He detected the owl.

The report here last week was accompanied by a fine full-length photo of the newsworthy owl, looking every centimetre (they grow to be more than 50 centimetres long and to have wingspans of up to 140 centimetres) the statuesque thing it is.

Now indefatigable Canberra ornithologist and photographer Geoffrey Dabb, contributor of some fine pictures to this column, has sent us some more intimate, sometimes more grisly pictures of the owl.

"Sometimes it has a possum in its clutches, nibbling on it during the day," Dabb explains.

Yes, Powerful Owls will hang things they've killed over a branch, returning to the ever-maturing meal when feeling peckish.

Dabb fancies "This