{"id":3866,"date":"2013-07-26T20:17:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-26T12:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/?p=3866"},"modified":"2013-07-30T10:25:17","modified_gmt":"2013-07-30T02:25:17","slug":"red-tailed-black-cockatoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/26\/red-tailed-black-cockatoo\/","title":{"rendered":"Red-tailed Black Cockatoo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"female<\/a> Over the last couple of days I have been hearing the breathy screeches of the\u00a0Red-tailed black cockatoos<\/a>, but they are really hard to see in the trees and almost impossible to photograph. \u00a0When going to let the chooks out at 11, there was a small group of 3 in a Jarrah tree near the coop and I managed to capture some images. \u00a0It is the first time I have seen a female up close and was surprised to see the yellow spots on the sides of her head and the pale scalloped look of her breast feathers.<\/p>\n

It was possibly a family group as it looked like a male and female with a juvenile. The males have broad red tail panels that are only visible when taking off or landing and the females have barred red tails.\"20130726<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0The Red-tailed Black Cockatoo<\/a> is monogamous and pair bond for life. Breeding can happen at any time of year but occurs mainly in spring and autumn. \u00a0The usually singular egg takes 30 days to hatch and the young stays in the nest for another 80 days.\u00a0 \u00a0The young bird is fed by exclusively by the parents for another 4 months and the parents will continue to feed the juvenile until it learns how to get the seeds out of the Marri nuts, which can take a year. \u00a0Interestingly, breeding varies between\u00a0years and is thought to be related to the level of Jarrah and Marri fruiting. \u00a0This year I noticed that the Marri flowered later<\/a>,\u00a0or for longer, than last year and had a lot of nuts<\/a>, so hopefully it was a successful breeding year. \u00a0Like all the big parrots, they can live for up to 50 years.<\/p>\n

\"red-tailed<\/a>Like the endangered Baudin they are a threatened species. \u00a0In the state they are listed as “Vulnerable: Schedule 1 \u2013 Western Australian Wildlife\u00a0Conservation Act\u201d,\u00a0and nationally listed as “Vulnerable: under Federal Environmental Protection and\u00a0Biodiversity Conservation Act\u201d. They used to be common, but are now classed as rare to uncommon and only patchily\u00a0distributed over a reduced range. \u00a0They are usually seen in pairs or small flocks. \u00a0As with many other native species, the population has\u00a0declined due to destruction of forests and woodlands, unseasonal burning and\u00a0competition for nest hollows with\u00a0feral European honeybees and ducks. \u00a0We have both ducks and bees nesting in the forest and I hadn’t realised that they were an issue. \u00a0A naturalist advised us to exterminate the bees,\"male<\/a> which seems counter intuitive as they are always busy pollinating the flowers of the marri trees.<\/p>\n

Unlike the Baudin cockatoo<\/a> they are happy eating the smaller seeds of the Jarrah tree. \u00a0Their bills can’t get in to the Marri nuts, so they chew the edges off them. \u00a0The West Australian Museum has produced a great factsheet that shows the marks the different parrots leave on the Marri nuts<\/a> as they try and eat them. \u00a0 Apparently 90% of the Forest Red-tailed Black Cockatoo’s diet is made up of the seeds from Marri and Jarrah fruits. They also eat sheoak, snottygobble and spotted gum, so with the 4000 spotted gum we have planted – they should have plenty to eat here.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last couple of days I have been hearing the breathy screeches of the\u00a0Red-tailed black cockatoos, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[8,19,7],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/20130726-029.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3866"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3866"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3896,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3866\/revisions\/3896"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}