![]() Originally the sulphur-crested cockatoo only existed west of the Great Dividing Range. They're a highly intelligent animal."įlight: Uneven flap-flap-glide, sometimes swoops to landĬall: A loud raucous screech. "They're quite clowns, so they do have a huge sense of fun. However, Dr Perry doesn't discount that the sulphur-crested cockatoos could just be having a bit of fun. Exploring that sort of thing," says Dr Perry. "It is finding out what is edible, what is not edible. His view is that the sulphur-crested cockatoos are adapting to the urban environment. "So it's probably quite pleasurable to chew into these soft structures."ĭr Ross Perry, self-proclaimed grandfather of the bird veterinarians, has a different theory. "It's like soft butter to a cockatoo's bill," says Dion Hobcroft of Taronga Park Zoo who has been watching birds since the age of seven. "They're pretty smart codgers," he says.Īnother reason is that soft woods like western red cedar are easy to chew. Kingsley Mead of Cockatoo Control, a company which has developed an electric fencing to protect the rubber absorbers placed on the rooves of houses with solar heated swimming pools, says that it is almost as if the cockatoos "decide" to attack a property, leaving the one next door untouched. "But they are also naturally destructive, just chewing things." "We know that in the wild they remove bark and they'll chew things up to try and find grubs," he says. He also says that the cockatoos use their beaks to wear them down so they don't overgrow.īird veterinarian Dr Michael Cannon agrees saying that sulphur-crested cockatoos will chew to keep their beaks, an important tool for everyday life, in good trim. "They do it because of boredom or because there's nothing else to do," says Associate Professor Lucio Filippich, an avian expert at the University of Queensland. It seems we don't know for sure why the cockies attack. There are various theories amongst experts as to why sulphur-crested cockatoos damage homes like the Balkin's. "And they weren't just chipping away at the timber," she says, "they were actually ripping the timber off the home and the timber railing." Sue Balkin came home one day in 2001 to be told by neighbours that 150 birds had "latched" onto the family house. When the Balkins family bought western red cedar for the exterior of the house they'd lived in for 17 years in Sydney's upper North Shore they didn't expect nature to bite back. In late summer, the baby birds leave the nest and like teenagers start exploring their environment and are more likely to destroy things. Parent cockatoos are trying to build nests in early spring. Cockatoos are most destructive in spring when they have an increased tendency to chew, especially in early spring and also in late summer.
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