Two juvenile black cockatoos sparred with open beaks in the tangled branches of a hakea. The cockatoos – teenagers in the human measure of age – struggled to maintain their balance on a low branch. As the tree swayed under the weight of a large party of black cockatoos, it was difficult to determine if the young cockies were play-fighting or in competition for the tastiest nuts dangling in gnarly pods on the tree.
Over the years the arrival of yellow-tailed black cockatoos to my garden has become an annual occurrence, timed for late autumn when the seeds of the hakea mature. If I didn’t see them arrive, I always knew the cockies were raiding the hakea because I could hear the crunching of the nuts in the cockies’ powerful beaks and the snapping of branches.
This year, though, the small family party that usually arrives, a male and female with single offspring, failed to turn up and I wondered what had become of them.
Three months on I managed to get my cockie “fix”, though, as winter turned to spring but I can’t be sure these were the ones that visited in the past. This was not just a single family but an extended one comprised of two pairs, a lone female and five juveniles.
It was a joy to watch them going about shredding my prized hakea, and littering the ground under it with shell husks, twigs and leaves. I’m only joking about the “shredding” because I know the cockies are actually giving the tree a beneficial prune.
I’ve also seen the apparent destruction cockies can do to silver banksias in another part of my garden but the trees also seem to flourish. The thinning of branches opens up the cockies’ favourite trees to sunlight, allowing flowers to form in bright light and nuts to grow and harden. The falling vegetation also provides leaf litter around the base of the tree, a natural mulch that keeps the soil moist and adds fertiliser once it has been broken down by insects and fungi.
The cockies stayed in my garden for an hour, and gave me a wonderful opportunity to watch them at close quarters. Although both sexes look similar, male and females are easily identified. The males have black beaks and a pink eye-ring. The females have grey beaks and their feathers are slightly freckled with brown. Juveniles look like females.
Black cockies have an uncanny ability to remember where they have found trees with fruits and nuts ready to be eaten and can be virtually guaranteed to return at the same time each year. Although I still wonder why the birds didn’t arrive as usual this year, one thing is certain – some of, if not all, of the cockies paying a call in the last week of August will be back when the nuts ripen next year.