The Plight of the Black Cockatoo

There are several species of these incredible parrots, some are more prolific then others and the red tail black cockatoos that visit our back yard are the forest red-tail cockatoo.

Nonetheless, they have come early this year and are eating green fruit before it has ripened to yellow.

They've been checking the trees regularly for some weeks.

These majestic birds are big, if you have seen a Macaw they are of a similar size, as such they eat a lot. 

Their feeding grounds have been seriously diminished in the last few years due to a variety of factors including repeated bush fires, even some being declared as 'Natural Disasters' and habitat destruction for human population expansion.

Black cockatoos are starving. (that article was published in 2012 and that year our visitors were happy to wait for the fruit to be ripe in our backyard, so food is even harder to come by this year it seems)

The current conservations status of the these beautiful creatures is 'near threatened' and yet you have probably never heard of them. Other species with the same 'near threatened' status include the jaguar, monarch butterfly, narwhal and white rhino.

The females have a red and black banded tail as can be seen in the above picture. 

The males have a bright red band on their tale without any black lines and even when their tale is not spread you can see how bright the red is on this male's. The photo below shows the male and female together.

They love to farm (IMHO) as they drop about as many seeds as they eat, and vigorously prune branches to promote new growth. Humans tend to think they are just making a mess.

They make quite the racket too with all their chitter chatter. It's such a joy to us when we hear them screeching away in the back yard. 

Kaarakin Black Cockatoo Recovery Centre do an amazing job year after year of rescuing and rehabilitating cockatoo's. They are endlessly in need of funding because they are little known and of course the more funding they have the more they can do.

Kaarakin are currently running a fundraiser (which appears to still be open although the goal date was for February) to keep the rescue programme running and are in need of help to meet their funding goal. Perhaps you could skip the next coffee and feed a cocky?

The proceeds from the last walking harnesses we purchased for Freki and Geri went to Kaarakin and I wish I could do more to help these fabulous birds so today I am sharing them with you.

These photos were taken this morning in my own back yard, I hope I get to take photos for many years to come.

Not exactly wordless (wordless Wednesday) but it does leave me speechless. 

Have you heard of  Black Cockatoos before?

This post was featured at