Posted Saturday at 21:04
Unusually, the female of this
cockatoo species is more colourful than the male.
He is truly glossy; black as tar
glistening in the heat, with a strong circle of red revealed on the tail, most
visible when seen from below. But he pales in comparison to his mate.
She is a stunner, with black
feathers scalloped in yellow, red and orange that swirl into a broach on her
chest and give her sub-species their name — the painted lady.
They belong to one of five
sub-species of red-tailed black cockies, spread out across Australia.
The south-eastern red-tailed
black cockatoo lives in a small area, completely isolated from its closest
evolutionary neighbours by huge swathes of impassable terrain.
These are birds that stand on the
precipice of extinction.
But the high-pitched sounds made
by fledgling chicks could be key to their preservation.
Rare and ever rarer
Like all black cockies, they're
most often heard before seen, calling from the air as they fly, then appearing
as a team of black crucifixes in the sky.
They look like a cross between a
raven and an eagle: large, solid and dark as night.
They move in forward motion on
longer wing strokes than seem physically possible. It's as if, by some miracle
of avian biology, they are held aloft more by magic than by wing beats.
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