A bird beloved – the story of the Glossy Black-cockatoo
There’s a bird out there that has brought people together for years. It’s called the Glossy Black-cockatoo and it’s the feature of a brand new episode in the Back from the Brink docu-series being run this year by Natura Pacific and the Glossy Black Conservancy.
The Glossy Black-cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus lathami) is the smallest of Australia’s five endemic black cockatoos. The adults grow up to about 50cm in length and have, in contrast to their English name, dusky chocolately heads and ashey-black plumage. Like many birds, the adults are sexually dimorphic meaning that males and females look different to one another. Males typically have a clear dark plumage apart from the tail which is barred with bright scarlet-red, while females have a splattering of yellow across their head and throat and their tail barring is more sunset-orange.
The birds have undergone extensive habitat loss since European colonisation and subsequent development. There are two essential elements of their life-cycle that constitute whether a patch of natural vegetation is suitable enough as habitat; these are the presence of their key preferred food-trees, she-oaks, and the presence of large hollow-bearing trees in which to nest. The she-oak family (Casuarinaceae) is a strange family of trees and shrubs that have a characteristic “pine-like” appearance with drooping or bushy greyish needles which seem to be leafless but do in fact harbour minute leaf-scales at joints along them. The important part of these plants is their nutrient-rich cones which form round or grenade-shaped capsules and pretty hard and impenetrable to many. Not so, the Glossy Black-cockatoos, which make quite literally, an easy meal of the cones, careful grinding and chewing them to extract the inner seeds which contain important fats and proteins for the birds. However, with land-clearing prevailing for a multitude of priority development areas in our lowland coastal flats around southern Queensland, much of the former range of the cockatoos has experienced a decline in healthy, productive she-oak stands, as these dry forests are often east-to-clear, prime real estate.
The second essential habitat element, the hollow-bearing tree, is what is most likely causing some of the decline experienced in these birds’ population in Queensland. Hollow-bearing trees have declined by up to 70% in some Queensland landscapes, and recent studies conducted by the Queensland Herbarium indicated that dead and living hollow-bearing trees are particularly sensitive to intense fires. The hollows can funnel flames into them creating chimney-like burnouts that can destabilise and topple many hollow-bearing trees. Imagine this like sky-scraper after sky-scraper of fully-furnished homes being destroyed in our cities leaving behind only office-blocks and car-parks… the end result, nowhere to live! For those hollows that do remain, this obviously leads to over-crowding, and in over-crowding its mostly the bullies that win, so step aside delicate, dainty, polite Glossy Blacks, and make way for Sulphur-crested Cockatoos and Rainbow Lorikeets!
You can see that the Glossy Blacks are doing it tough. However, surely no bird in Queensland has as much of a task-force behind it than this one, aiming to truly bring it back from the brink. Take the mic, the Glossy Black Conservancy (https://glossyblack.org.au/). This multi-disciplinary alliance of people from councils, government, academia and community have banded together for over 20 years to map, record, monitor and fuel change to try and restore and reconnect Glossy Black habitat. From cockatoo-spotting training days to developing nesting tubes (apparently a type of nest box but these birds prefer long deep tubes!) and from appearances on the Netflix film ‘Breaking Boundaries’ with Sir David Attenborough to developing factsheets spread across numerous councils, this team have really put in the effort. Perhaps one of the most attainable ways to help the team, and the birds of course, is to get involved with their annual Glossy Black-cockatoo Birding Day which takes place right across southern Queensland from the Tweed River all the way to Noosa once a year. The event is a free event and requires minimal preparation; just registration and some basic training to know what the cockatoo looks like. To find out more and become part of this fantastic initiative, visit: https://www.facebook.com/events/1445896569085882/.
Additionally to the hard-work on the ground in spotting, recording and mapping the remaining cockatoos in the wild, the new Back from the Brink film dedicated to this remarkable bird, will aim to raise its profile even more within our community as a flagship species. It is hoped that by making more people aware about what the bird is, where it lives, why it’s declining and how we can all easily take part in reversing that decline, the birds may stand a better chance of a future.
So if you’re thinking, what can I do for nature this year in my small block of land, why look any further than making the Glossy Black-cockatoo your new favourite critter, and invest some of your free time into learning more, doing more and creating a little slice of habitat in your local area!
To watch Back from the Brink and all its past and current seasons, visit: https://bit.ly/3gJf1VC
To listen to the accompanying Back from the Brink podcasts on your commute to work, listen on your favourite podcasting app by searching “Natura Pacific Back from the Brink” or click here: https://apple.co/3nhCb5P
Read more in this White Paper produced by the Glossy Black Conservancy
