Australia has six black cockatoo species.
All are intelligent, sociable, spectacularly agile, and have very powerful beaks.
The world’s only two white-tailed black cockatoo species – both endangered – are endemic to southwest Western Australia.
My beloved and I are lucky enough to see and hear one of them – Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo – on hundreds of occasions, every year.
The featured image shows behaviour which is very familiar to us.
The other photos show something “new”, at least to us.
We have many times watched Carnabys make very short work of Marri and other Eucalypts’ “nuts”, Macadamia nuts, Banksia “cones” and pine cones.
They eat “grubs” too; Carnabys expertly use their beaks to winkle out any edible critters
Sometimes, they are flamboyantly destructive – if insects/their larvae inhabit your roof’s rotting eaves, ravenous Carnabys may well “finish” the eaves.
The featured, “familiar” image is copyright Doug Spencer, taken at 9.am on 03 September 2021, in Lightning Swamp Bushland, in the Perth suburb of Noranda.
Click here for info on this rewarding location
Seventeen days later, late in the afternoon, we were nearly 600 kilometres southeast of Perth, in one of our favourite places – Fitzgerald River National Park.
A couple of kilometres west of East Mount Barren, we saw Carnabys do something we had never previously witnessed, although I suspect that in this particular location it is perfectly normal eating behaviour, whenever “psychedelic toothbrushes” are available.
I suggest that you zoom in on our heroes’ beaks.
Providing an uncommonly easy meal – posing no challenge in the dexterity or beak-strength departments – were the flowers of a member of the Protea family which naturally occurs only in and near to the Fitzgerald Biosphere.
Locally, Grevillea neorigida is known as “Toothbrush Grevillea”.
To my knowledge, only the colourful appearance of this “toothbrush” is psychedelic.
