Cockatoos develop taste for world’s stinkiest fruit on Top End farm

Australia’s largest durian farm has started this year’s harvest and you can smell the tropical fruit permeating from the orchard.

Durians are regarded as the “king of fruit”, but their smell can be so offensive that in some countries they are banned on public transport and in hotels.

“It’s a pleasant smell for me, but I know some people feel it has a sulphuric, rotten-egg smell like a leaking gas bottle,” grower Han Shiong Siah said.

His family planted durian trees near Darwin more than 35 years ago and has seen the fruit’s popularity grow.

But this year, the fruit has also caught the attention of Australia’s sulphur-crested cockatoo.

“We’re starting to see cockatoos attack a particular variety of durian, and unfortunately it’s our premium variety that’s getting attacked,” he said.

“It’s just that variety I’ve noticed they’ve developed a taste for and it’s a bit annoying.”

Mr Siah said durians had a hard, spiky exterior, and the cockatoos with their “steel beaks” had found a way to crack into the fruit and access the creamy, yellow flesh inside.

“It’s just a recent thing,” he said.

“We used to have a farm down the road that grew melons and the cockatoos and corellas stayed down there at this time of the year, so we didn’t have much of a bird problem.

“But that [land] is now becoming a croc farm and cockatoos don’t like crocodiles, so they’ve immigrated down to neighbouring farms and some have started liking a taste of durian.”

Expensive taste

Mr Siah said the first durians of the season were fetching more than $30 a kilogram wholesale, meaning the cockatoos “were picking the most expensive fruit in town”.

He said despite the pressure from birds, as well as extreme temperatures, he expected a reasonable harvest this year of up to 15 tonnes.

In 2014-2015 Mr Siah travelled the world through a Nuffield scholarship to study alternative and cost-effective methods of deterring birds and bats from destroying crops.

He said next year if his mango season finished before the durian season again, he would use a range of bird-scaring techniques to try to keep the cockatoos away, although he admitted they were “stubborn to move”.