Tag Archives: yellow tailed black cockatoos

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June 5, 2016

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Backyard birds, Fruit, Fruits for shade, Gardening, national parks, Permaculture, Rats, Satin bowerbirds, Seasons, Weather

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A flash of gold and a stash of blue

yellow boat and low cloud horizontal larger

Season of mists and mellow tinnies: the Hawkesbury in fall

Autumn lasted for aroundabout a fortnight this year.  The endless summer of an apocalyptic El Nino wrapped up in mid-May, giving the deciduous trees an extremely tight schedule to dispense with their leaves before this weekend’s torrential rain.

“Apollo” muscadino grape vine leaves
The neighbour’s rather confused liquidambar
Liquidambar autumnal leaves
Persimmon leaves turning
Yellowing grape leaf

We’ve had autumnal glory in the kitchen as well.  When Keats talked about the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, I’m not sure he was thinking about bananas.  In theory our crop of tiny fragrant fruits should have been perfect for lunchboxes, but I made the mistake of describing the first-ripened one as “Geoffrey”.   After this, not only Geoffrey but all his brothers were deemed “too cute” to be eaten.

Gary Cooper is quite impressed with our collection of home grown bananas
Geoffrey’s cousin
Literally a hand of bananas

As well as the gold in the fruitbowl, there’s been plenty of gold in the trees.  The yellow-tailed black cockatoos are back in force, mewling and crunching in the radiata pines.

Yellow tail and autumn leaves horizontal

Fly by from a yellow tailed black cockatoo

And for the first time this year, I’ve noticed the migrating yellow-faced honeyeaters.  Thousands of them pass through the Blue Mountains most autumns, it seems, but this year they’ve been funnelled between the mountains and the coast, through the Hunter Valley.  I first spotted them darting through the riverside casuarinas at Karuah National Park, on our trip north, but since we’ve been back, I’ve seen flocks of them with their travelling companions, the noisy friarbirds, pouring up the Hawkesbury.  I’ve even seen them on the way to work, taking a moment out on their journey to watch the commuters boarding the morning train at Berowra Station.

Noisy friarbirds on the move up the river
Yellow tail captured exactly this time last year
Yellow-faced honeyeater at Berowra Station

But not all the autumnal excitement has been touched with gold.  Last weekend, halfway through detaining my broad beans (fencing, netting and a mulch of lavender and liquidambar – doubtless all in vain) I spotted a little collation of royal blue underneath the pomegranate tree. Nerf gun ammunition, the lid of a milk container, a peg.  Signs that we need to tidy up the yard, and a hint that randy bowerbirds might just do it for us.

Female bowerbird on the look out for an attractive collection of nerf gun pellets
The beginnings of a bower?

 

More autumnal reflections from our backyard:

Let them eat light!

Autumn in terminal decline?

yellow sunset medium.jpg

Backyard gold

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May 22, 2015

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Animal communication, Backyard birds, Native animals

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The secret lives of big bold bug-eating birds

Australian magpie with hairy caterpillar

In my fantasy life, my garden is filled with the delicate calls of rare and tiny birds that feed exclusively on cabbage white butterflies, flies and mosquito larvae, and pause in their labours only occasionally (at times of the day with particularly flattering light) to perch photogenically directly opposite my back deck.

My real backyard, however, like the rest of Australian suburbia, is awash with great big, loud, gallus beasties: cockatoos, kookaburras, magpies and of course the damned brush turkeys.  Seems like there’s more of them here in Sydney than ever before.

They may be common as muck, these big bold birds, but they’re not to be sneered at.  They have their own mysteries.  How do breeding magpies meet and pair off?  Why are kookaburras so faithful to their mates? How do cockatoos select whose timber house they’re going to rip to shreds?

To be fair, if the bird-life in suburbia is fairly predictable, bird watchers are pretty bog-standard as well.  I love this comment, in an article marvelling at the speed with which bird atlases are compiled, while more unglamorous animals – favoured by God, perhaps, but not necessarily by citizen scientists – live and die in obscurity.

“Ornithology… was a totally useless subject, the amateur’s field par excellence, largely ignored by even non-utilitarian academics.  No one entered it expecting to be given money and no one, for sure, had ever emerged with any.  Yet… it was here that organised natural history was to accomplish its greatest feats…. its secret lay in numbers.  Birds had a breadth of appeal that no other branch of natural history could rival” (Allen, cited in Adam, 2010, 11)

I’m cultivating LBB habitat and an interest in beetles.  In the meantime, there’s still the challenge of trying to figure out what the “obvious fauna” (Wilks, 2010, 288) are up to in my backyard.

For instance, what’s going on here?

Arriving
Eating kookaburra
Posing kookaburra
Laughing kookaburra
Departing kookaburra

Was there was a stash of sausages in this hollow in the pine tree to put that big smile on this kookaburra’s dial?   If so, they must have been those tiny party saveloys since she kept coming back for more.

Actually, kookaburras don’t subsist entirely on barbecue left-overs or snakes.  Insects make up a big part of their diet, and like magpies, they normally find food on the ground, dropping onto prey from a perch above so they don’t have to do any aerial acrobatics toting that great big kingfisher beak.

Given that birds usually feed in the leaf-litter, or in the sky, or in the canopy – they don’t usually mix it up – I’m not 100% sure this was actually snacking.  Like cockies and magpies, kookaburras are have stable, even “traditional”, territories guarded by the same breeding pair for years and years (Legge, 2010, 48).  And cackling away together isn’t the only way that kookaburra clans – pair-bonded breeding couples and their older offspring “helpers” – mark out their turf.  They also stake their claim with some mid-air show-offery.

Kookaburra family resemblances

Sarah Legge describes one such bit of border policing, a “bellyflop display”: “a single bird flies from a perch to another tree 5-20 metres away in a graceful swoop that ends with a flared landing on the lip of a hollow.  It pauses there momentarily, then swoops back to its original perch”.

Sounds pretty familiar, though I didn’t see a rival posse of bellyfloppers in action today.  Maybe my kookaburra was getting in shape for a big flopping battle down the track.   Or maybe she was really was scarfing saveloys…?  Without photographic evidence, who can say…?

The most delicious tree in Berowra
Cockatoo macerated tree

Another of this week’s mysteries: what makes this poor benighted tree the most delicious in the neighbourhood?

After our recent visits by black cockatoos, I wondered if that this scarified specimen might be host to  wood boring larvae that are said to appeal to the yellowtail palate.  I’ve come to suspect that proper ornithologists share the bird watching punter’s lack of interest in bugs, since descriptions of cockatoos’ preferences are ubiquitously vague –  the sites I’ve consulted all comment tersely that yellowtails like “some insects”.  Thanks for the detail, guys.

Yellow tailed black cockatoo
Yellow tailed block cockatoos flying

Mind you, maybe this vagueness is a result of the fact we’re all so “meh” about bugs we can’t even be bothered giving them names.  David Wilks notes, for instance, that a survey of just four types of eucalypts in Western Australia recently identified more than two thousand species, most of them unknown (Wilkes, 2010, 288). I reckon we’re well overdue for a PR campaign to sell us on cute, quirky and cuddly bugs. And there is one!  Manu Saunders is trying to spark up a month long celebration of “Arthropod April” … though thinking about it, we may need “Arthropod August” as well…

If I couldn’t identify the mystery larvae, I had no trouble working out the true culprit in The Mystery of the Tortured Tree:

Sulphur crested cockatoo illuminated
Not eating, chucking

Is this sulphur crested cockie digging out one of those 2,000 species of unnamed critters?  Does the bark of this specimen have a particularly good mouth-feel, that buttery consistency that just says “bite me“?  Or is this just the local flock‘s agreed upon spot to hang out and have a beak manicure?

Okay, there’s no bird identification challenge here, but I reckon there’s still plenty of secrets to be told in big boofy bird psychology.

Sulphur crested cockatoo eating a tree… with added bug?

References

Adam, Paul (2010) “The study of natural history – a PPP” from Daniel Lunney, Pat Hutchings and Dieter Hochuli (eds) The Natural History of Sydney, Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales

Kaplan, Gisela T. (2004) The Australian Magpie: the biology and behaviour of an unusual songbird, CSIRO Publishing

Legge, Sarah (2004) Kookaburra: King of the Bush, CSIRO Publishing

Recher, Harry F. (2010) “A not so natural history: the vertebrate fauna of Sydney” from Daniel Lunney, Pat Hutchings and Dieter Hochuli (eds) The Natural History of Sydney, Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales

Wilks, David (2010) “A hotbed of biodiversity? A natural history of the Ku-ring-gai council area” from Daniel Lunney, Pat Hutchings and Dieter Hochuli (eds) The Natural History of Sydney, Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales

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May 2, 2015

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Backyard birds, Climate change, Garden trees, Gardening, Plants that attract wildlife

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Timber!

We’ve had a mob of at least fifteen yellow tailed black cockatoos hanging around in the last few days, mewing like strangled cats and being chased around by magpies and (I think) even noisy minors.  We get the yellow tails quite often around these parts, especially in the winter-time, thanks to the large and sickly but apparently tasty radiata pines that loom over our place.

A male yellow tailed black cockatoo enjoying a pine cone in the neighbours’ yard
Yellow tailed cockatoo tucking in
Silhouette of a yellow tailed black cockatoo

The rule in Hornsby Shire is you can cut down a tree that’s within three metres of the foundations of your house.  If only there was some special by-law where the council chops down the tree for you for free if you can’t slip a paperback book between a towering pine and your bathroom.  One of these days I’ll be communing with nature and the nearest treebole will swell just that tiny bit further and burst straight through into the shower cubicle. That fresh piney smell with not a cent spent on disinfectant.

Two of the less prepossessing pines in our yard
This tree is cold and wants to be inside

It’s been very very very windy in Sydney lately, and quite a few people have been unfortunate enough to experience that piney odour, quickly followed by plenty of refreshing indoor rain. We’ve been pretty lucky, but we’ve spent a lot of time staring anxiously out the window at various ominously swaying monumental specimens.  When I lived in Brisbane I used to be a bit judgey about the lawn to tree ratio in most peoples’ yards.  But if cyclones start creeping their way down the coast I may have to reconsider.

Female yellow tailed cockatoos and a male peeping out of
Yellow tailed black cockatoo enjoying a dead tree at our place
Black cockatoo angel

Yellow tailed black cockatoos are doing pretty well on the east coast, including urban areas, no doubt thanks to their penchant for pines.  But apparently they often struggle to find nesting sites, preferring hollows in trees a century or more old.  They seem to like our senescent radiatas, and spend time perched high on the various dead branches voguing.  I hope, when we finally save enough shekels to pull down the extensive array of dangerous trees in our yard, we still see them.

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June 6, 2014

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Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, chicken diet, Garden trees, Ornamental gardens, Plants and what I know about them, Plants that attract wildlife, Seasons

The liquidambar feast

The liquidambar feast

So much excitement over such tiny seeds (or more accurately, in terms that will never be used in an up-market menu, even after the zombie apocalypse: “abortive seeds resembling sawdust“).  Check out the mucky faces of these lorikeets.  The yellow tailed black cockatoos love them too.  At first, there’s just the occasional thump of the prickly round fruits hitting the deck, as if there’s a poltergeist at work.  Then you hear a rustling overhead and a plaintive mewing, like a kitten stuck up the tree.

Black cockatoo

Don Burke doesn’t like liquidambar: they have thirsty roots that will choke your pipes and lift your pavers.   But the 20 metre tree at our place shades us and our epiphytes in summer, lights up the yard in autumn, and by May, let the scraps of winter sun that makes it over the hill slide in through our front windows.  The piles of fallen leaves get kicked up by the kids, scratched through by the chooks and dumped under the trees as easy if messy mulch.  With my pro-native plant prejudices I wouldn’t have planted it, and if the sewage pipe backs up I’ll come to hate it, but it’s easy to love a deciduous tree.