They will plant 19,000 trees across three sites – drooping sheoaks for food and eucalypts such as river red gum and pink gum for nesting hollows. “Greening Australia and WWF are rebuilding quality habitat and we’re really excited that this could potentially bring glossy black cockatoos back to the mainland,” he said. The WWF Australia forests program manager, Ben Sanders, said only about 2% of the original 22,000 hectares of sheoak woodland remains on the Fleurieu. But against all expectations, in 2020 there were 454 birds. In 2019, bushfires destroyed more than half of the sheoak feeding habitat and almost four in 10 nesting spots. The population slowly built up to more than 350 by 2016. In the 1970s much of the glossies’ SA habitat was cleared for development.īy 1995, when recovery efforts began, there were just 158 birds left.
They feed almost exclusively on the seeds of the drooping sheoak and nest in hollows in eucalyptus trees. The SA subspecies is smaller than those on the east coast, has a more bulbous bill and is endangered whereas the others are listed as vulnerable. They are vulnerable to habitat destruction through development and flooding, the possums that eat their eggs and young chicks, and threats from galahs, little corellas, sulphur-crested cockatoos and feral honeybees. Young birds have yellow spots on their heads, breasts, bellies and flanks.īird pairs mate for life and raise just one fledgling a year. The males have red or orange stripes on their tails and the adult females have yellow patches on their heads. Glossy black cockatoos are the smallest of Australia’s black cockatoo species.
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Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup “If we plant it, hopefully they will come, make little cockatoo babies and then spread out and multiply,” the Greening Australia senior program officer, Andrew Woodroffe, said. Now, Greening Australia and the WWF Australia are planting almost 20,000 trees in the hope of tempting the birds across Backstairs Passage to the Fleurieu Peninsula. For now, the SA subspecies of “glossies” exists only on Kangaroo Island, where it rose from the ashes of the 2019-20 bushfires that destroyed much of its habitat.
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