When Eyre Peninsula farmer Sharon Brands hears the unmistakable screeching of her annual visitors who have come to stay for the winter she rushes outside in excitement to greet them.
But it has become a bittersweet moment with fewer yellow-tailed black cockatoos, Calyptorhynchus funereus, returning each year.
While the birds are listed as vulnerable in South Australia, with the largest populations in the Adelaide Hills and the state’s south-east, ecologists estimate the Eyre Peninsula population to be less than a dozen.
Sharon Brands makes sure there is water for cockatoos on her property. (ABC Eyre Peninsula: Jodie Hamiton)
The cockatoos spend summer breeding in Koppio Hills and nearby locations on the lower Eyre Peninsula, and migrate to the north-western Eyre Peninsula for winter, according to a Department for Environment SA report.
Despite being a demographically isolated population, South Australian Museum Ornithology Collection manager Maya Penck said a 2021 proposal to identify the Eyre Peninsula birds as its own species — so the population could be shown as endangered — was rejected because of a lack of genetic evidence.
Ms Penck said the Eyre Peninsula birds were one of several subspecies of the yellow-tailed black cockatoo.
“The subspecies found on the Eyre Peninsula is the same as the one found in the rest of SA and Victoria, but the population here is very restricted in their range due to habitat only being suitable at the very southern tip of the peninsula,” Ms Penck said.
The number of yellow-tailed black cockatoos is dwindling in the upper Eyre Peninsula. (ABC Eyre Peninsula: Jodie Hamilton)
The birds have been migrating between the Koppio Hills area to the Ucontitchie Hills since local farmers can remember.
But local landholders, who count the cockies on their properties each season as part of a citizen science project, say the situation is dire with just seven birds recorded for the past two years.
Survival for another 10 years ‘unlikely’
Ecologist and former National Parks ranger David Farlam said there was a flock of about 50 birds on the Eyre Peninsula in the 1980s but their numbers were now critically low.
“I think the chances of the yellow-tailed black cockatoo surviving another 10 years is pretty unlikely,” Mr Farlam said.
Nesting boxes were placed in trees to encourage breeding when there were still 28 birds, but it may already have been too late.
David Farlam is concerned the cockies will die out on the Eyre Peninsula. (ABC Eyre Peninsula: Jodie Hamilton)
National Parks and Wildlife Service SA conservation ecologist Katrina Pobke said the loss of habitat through settlement and land clearing had impacted flocks that would have numbered in the hundreds of thousands across southern Australia’s woodlands more than 10,000 years ago.
The critical blow came when 2005’s Wangary bushfire, which burnt 78,000 hectares, wiped out their nesting areas in the Wanilla forest and more than likely killed many birds.
According to official counts by citizen scientists, there were 21 cockatoos before the fire but only 14 were accounted for after the disaster, and that number dropped to 11 in 2006.
Landholders record sightings and weather conditions. (ABC Eyre Peninsula: Jodie Hamilton)
Mr Farlam said, at one stage, eggs were taken and raised in Adelaide with about eight chicks hatching, but their survival upon being returned to Eyre Peninsula was fraught.
“The young birds, unfortunately, hadn’t learned from their adults and were silly enough to do things like forage on the ground and get eaten by foxes. So their death rate was quite high,” Mr Farlam said.
The experts say trans-locating adults from other areas in the state to the region may be the only chance for survival on the Eyre Peninsula.
“Perhaps we could find a benefactor who could take on looking after the cockies and initiate a captive program of bringing over adult birds, which are a bit smarter than young birds — and would survive,” Mr Farlam said.
Katrina Pobke says yellow-tailed black cockatoos eat seeds and wood-boring grubs. (ABC Eyre Peninsula: Jodie Hamilton)
Ms Pobke said intervention was needed to save the birds.
“I would love for someone to come forward … and really help take the yellow-tailed black cockatoos under their wing and get some conservation action,” Ms Pobke said.
“Reintroduction or translocation is the hardest part of conservation work so it’s not an easy fix, but it’s not impossible.”
The last survivors
Retired Mount Damper farmer Marcia Jericho, known as the Cocky Lady, helped coordinate a National Parks citizen science project to record sightings of the birds from the 1980s to the early 2000s.
Marcia Jericho collated cockatoo sightings for more than 20 years. (ABC Eyre Peninsula: Jodie Hamilton)
Her data recording 24 winters painted a sad picture of a subspecies dying out.
Ms Jericho said there were up to 29 cockatoos that visited the 52 Aleppo pine trees near her and her husband Neville’s house in 1982.
When they retired to Ceduna 34 years later there were just seven birds left.
She remembered her first impressions of the iconic bird when she moved to the area.
Some of the remaining yellow-tailed black cockatoos that visit Mount Damper. (ABC Eyre Peninsula: Jodie Hamilton)
“In April, suddenly these big yellow-tailed black cockatoos appeared in the pine trees and they just kept coming back,” Ms Jericho said.
“It was fascinating to sit there and watch them strip the pine cones. They came for the seeds in the pine cones.”
She started recording the sightings for the environment department and delivered diaries to 16 other neighbours in the area to track the birds, even making her own recording sheets “because the department was slow in posting the diaries to me”.
She still has her data and scrapbooks of photographs and newspaper clippings.
“I couldn’t help myself, I was just so intrigued with the black cockatoos,” Ms Jericho said.
“It became part of my life.”
Aleppo pine cones and seeds attract cockatoos to Johnny Brendel’s home. (ABC Eyre Peninsula: Jodie Hamilton)
Local Johnny Brendel used to look forward to the opening rains each winter, heralding the arrival of the cockatoos.
But he too had seen fewer and fewer each year.
“It’s been in my life for a long time. I can’t wait for them to come,” Mr Brendel said.
“It’s bittersweet because their numbers are so low.”
