You can only tell the sex of the bird by the colour of the eyes: males have a solid black iris, females a red iris. Tracking has also found cockies are very egalitarian when it comes to parenting, with each long-term partner taking turns to stay with the eggs and the chicks, while the other goes out foraging, Dr Martin says. Sometimes multiple flocks will converge on a particular area for a festival of feeding. Professor Kaplan says cockatoos also communicate by changing the shape of their yellow crest and combining this with different body postures to indicate alarm, availability or something lighter.įor example, for 15 years she's taken care of a cockatoo called Pumpkin who can no longer fly due to injury.Īnd she knows when Pumpkin is feeling playful: "His crest goes up completely and his head starts bobbing up and down and sideways."Īnd he says, just like in a township, the birds hang out in various combinations, including gangs of 5 to 20 birds who are best mates. They have other shorter calls for communication, she adds. She says this behaviour evolved as a way of terrifying away would-be predators, even though there are few of those left around these days. It was frightening," Professor Kaplan says. "The worst I ever heard was a flock of 150 that sounded like a freight train. If there's one thing sulphur-crested cockatoos are known for, it's their loud, raucous screeching as they zoom overhead: it can be quite deafening when they're in big numbers. Professor Kaplan says some of the damage caused by cockatoos may be a result of humans having gotten rid of so much of the birds' natural habitat. He says keeping them away involves a bit of persistence - you can try spraying them with water, putting a taut wire above railings, or using bird-safe netting to exclude them from areas. "It could just be they've got a bad attitude," says Dr Martin, adding it might be boredom or playfulness, and it might only be some individuals that are guilty of this behaviour. They might be sharpening their beak - but that seems like a lot of sharpening! Without being inside the mind of a sulphur-crested cockatoo, it's not clear why they do this sort of thing.
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