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‘Court jesters’ put on a show

July 9, 2022 Don Knowler

The “court jesters” came calling with a song and a dance to brighten my mood on a bleak winter’s day. As soon as a party of 12 black cockatoos arrived I knew I was in for an afternoon of entertainment.
A Covid-19 alert had confined me to home after discovering I was a secondary contact with one of my son’s friends who had tested positive for the virus.
But the antics of the yellow-tailed black cockatoos saved the day and gave me something to smile about
Although the appellation “jester” might appear strange for birds largely dressed in black, with a call variously described as a durge or the Celtic Irish name for a lament, a keen, the cockies brought light to darkness, joy to a sombre day.
The cockatoos came dressed for the occasion. Their black feathers fluffed up, pumped with warm air to insulate them against an icy breeze. They looked bigger and rounder than usual, their long pastel-yellow tail feathers carried like trains, their matching yellow cheek patches appearing as hastily-applied make-up in the rush to get on stage.
The arena for my jesters was a spreading hakea whose nuts always attract them at this time of each year.
If I don’t see them arrive, I hear the steady, rhythmic crack of nutshells and, always, the monotonous call of a youngster begging for food. It’s a sound like someone using sandpaper.
So it was in late June, the rasping of sandpaper, the crunch of nuts, the squawks, the joisting and jostling, the acrobatics in the highest limbs of the hakea, the free-fall to the ground to retrieve nuts which had fallen from beak and claw.
And, as ever, there was one cockie, the main player, standing out with his or her antics. This time a juvenile female, sitting atop the hakea in a sentry-like pose, making her sandpaper sound from an ivory beak hidden beneath a wreath of black plumes, feathers looking like a scarf rolled around her neck and face. Two other juvenile females were in the troupe and two young males – displaying the male’s charcoal coloured beak – were feeding in the tree below her.
Along with the youngsters, I counted three adult males and four mature females in the flock.
By coincidence, black cockies had been very much in my thoughts after I had read a report dominating the front page of the Saturday Mercury about the high rate of animal and bird culls in Tasmania.
Thankfully black cockies were way down the list of the millions of native creatures killed in recent years under crop protection permits.
Only 18 black cockatoos. compared with 14,103 of their sulphur-crested cousins.
I wondered what the black cockies in particular had done to warrant such retribution – not a thought to dwell on when caught in the spell of the court jester.

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