Black cockatoos demand your attention wherever they go!
I love to draw black cockatoos. They are big, beautiful and bold. Ripping through branches like bits of cardboard. And somehow, always look like they are in cruise control in flight overhead. Like they know… they are the cool kids in town. Each with a splash of colour to their tail, and screech to recon with any around
We love our wildlife, and love to say our. They build a sense of pride in us, no matter how unfounded. I don’t know about you, but I stop, and look to the skies whenever I hear that call. Or choir, as sometimes it may. We love to love. It’s nice to find those things, those special things in life that make it feel so much more than me.
Encouraging, coaxing me to step out from behind my black and white. With a touch of red, they come alive. Australian wildlife, and Australian birds in particular, offer my style of drawing so much movement and play. They offer a connection to our country, and a connection to our past that is unchanged except for their numbers.
What are the biggest threats to cockatoos?
- All Western Australian species of black cockatoo are threatened by habitat loss and degradation, competition from other birds for nesting sites and declining food supplies.
- The forest red-tailed black cockatoos are threatened by habitat loss, competition for rare nesting hollows and by injury from European honeybees. The federal government’s recovery plan for this subspecies was implemented in October 2021 with a view to reducing the burden these threats place on the species.
- Baudin’s and Carnaby’s black cockatoos are particularly endangered and are considered likely to become extinct in the wild.
- Like the forest red-tailed black cockatoo, these species are threatened by loss of nesting hollows due to deforestation from mining and timber industries, habitat fragmentation, loss of native food sources from urban development and bushfires.
- On the east side of Australia, the south-eastern glossy black cockatoo was listed as vulnerable under national environment law in August 2022. These cockatoos feed almost exclusively on cones from mature female casuarina trees and rely on the hollows of old eucalypts for nesting – trees that were hit hard by the devastating bushfires of 2019-20. [Australian Conservation Foundation]
