No blog about Australia would be complete without an entry on the white cockatoo (or the peckatoo, James?). Throughout this part of New South Wales, there are hundreds of thousands of the sulphur-crested cockatoos. These are beautiful white birds in the parrot family, with a vivid yellow crest and soft lemon feathers under their wings. You see them at the beach, in the parkland, in the bush, in the city – in fact, everywhere.
Sulphur-crested cockatoos make the most raucous screeching noise: we hear them first thing in the morning, and then again, in the evening as they are beginning to roost. They perch on top of TV aerials, fences, and cabbage palm trees and screech at each other. (you can hear what they sound like on the audio below). They are sociable birds, and I often wonder what they are saying to each other. In the evening, they all flock together and fly to the escarpment behind Wollongong to roost: there are white birds everywhere, and the air is filled with a chorus of screeching, until they all settle down to sleep in the trees, looking like white candles on the branches.
They are very curious and intelligent birds, and we have often found them watching us! One kept an eye on us from a barn rafter in Audley in the Royal National Park; another one watched us eat lunch at Symbio Wildlife Park; and another observed our breakfasting habits on Hamilton Island. Of course, they are keen to share our food, and when James and Daniel visited Symbio we saw one cheeky fellow take someone’s packed lunch from the table, fly to a branch and then very deftly, rip off the plastic to eat the food inside.
They also love eating the kernels inside the banksia cones, and at the moment, they must be particularly tasty, as we keep passing banksia trees where the ground is littered with spent cones, sprigs of banksia, and broken twigs. They are not very tidy eaters! But they are extremely dexterous, using their curved beaks to extract the kernels, and then using their claws as skilfully as we use hands.
Perhaps our biggest surprise was at Symbio with Mia and Summer when we heard one say ‘Hello’ to us several times. It was in a cage, which seemed odd, as there are so many wild ones there. But we found out that it was a pet that someone didn’t want to keep, and so the wildlife park staff were caring for it. Birds shouldn’t be kept in cages as pets!
Nana Down Under 