A maelstrom of whirling birds brought an air of chaos and confusion to the skies over Long Beach, Lower Sandy Bay. As sulphur- crested cockatoos and galahs shrieked and screamed in their spirals of flight, I gazed skywards, searching for a peregrine falcon.
The fastest bird on earth, a passing peregrine was sure to have put the cockatoos to flight but I looked in vain for the raptor. Instead, I could only make out the shape of lone yellow-tailed black cockatoo.
The lanky-winged and long-tailed black cockie looked confused and out of place amid the rising and falling flock of the other fast-flying parrots. The black cockie was certainly not welcome among them. When they darted east, it followed them and then was swept up in the mass of about 100 birds as they veered west.
The black cockie’s flight was slow and deliberate, with upswept wings showing fingers of feathers at their tips. At a distance it looked more like a swamp harrier than a member of the parrot family. And then the penny dropped – the flighty and nervous cockies had mistaken the black cockatoo for a raptor.
Birds have an amazing ability to decipher both shape and sound. They can instantly identify the shape of a perching bird as friend or foe. And they read different elements of birdsong as we do language.
I’ve learned this over the years from the new holland honeyeaters that make their home in my garden. Their shrill, piping alarm call tells me if here is a brown goshawk or collared sparrowhawk about, even if I can’t see one of these species that hunts by ambush, concealing themselves in a tree or bush.
And I can tell by the pitch and tone of the alarm the level of danger. A short, rapid peeping, carrying the sound of panic, tells me the raptor may be about to strike.
Such calls are brief, before the honeyeater falls silent and retreats to the heart of a thick, spiked bush of bottlebrush or grevilia for safety. At such times, the silvereyes, robins, fairywrens and other garden birds fall deathly silent, waiting for the danger to pass.
A peregrine passing overhead draws a totally different response. A honeyeater perched as a look-out on a thin branch does not bother to flee because a peregrine high in the sky would not be a direct threat. The honeyeater is merely content to record its flight with a gentle twitter.
Not so the parrots at Long Beach. Their belief that a bird of prey was among them is supposition on my part, of course, but it appeared a young cockie just out of the parental flock, and finding his or her way, had strayed among them. The confused juvenile finally got the message, a flight of whirling dervishes sending it on its way.