After some time off to move house to north west Tasmania, start a new job and settle into my new surroundings, I’m back in the blogging zone. 😃📷🏠🏖️
And one of the first birds I saw from my new home was several yellow tailed black cockatoos, having a snack in a banksia tree!
These birds were a joy to watch, even if they did decimate the tree of flowers and left remnants on the ground below!
Before winter came, a large flock of sulphur crested cockatoos turned up one afternoon in a neighbour’s tree.
Look at them all!
There was so many of them and it was very noisy, even from where I was two doors down.
The sulphur crested cockatoo is found all over Australia. They are large birds of about 52cm in length, and are very noisy, either in groups or individually! They can also be quite destructive as I’m sure many Aussies reading this would have had a cockatoo gnaw away at their wooden verandah or ruin their TV antenna at some stage.
These cockatoos on the neighbour’s tree looked like they were eating the nuts off the trees.
Look at the cheeky cockatoo with its crest up on the top left in this next photo. 😆
Thankfully the birds didn’t stay too long and they flew off into the afternoon sun (probably to annoy another neighbour lol).
Back in June I was walking at Tamar Island Wetlands and spotted a few yellow tailed black cockatoos. They were having a good old go at the branches of a gum tree, probably looking for insect borers that they like to eat.
These beautiful birds are quite large, around 66cm in length. They have a distinct call which makes people look up trying to spot them as they fly over almost in slow motion.
I happened to come across some photos I took some years ago of red tailed black cockatoos that visited our yard.
Occasionally, I see these birds fly overhead late in the afternoon, but to see them in a tree close to the house was quite an event.
These beautiful birds are quite large, measuring a length of about 60cm. The females are black with yellow marks around the head and neck areas, while the males are black with bright red panels in their tail feathers.
On this particular morning, I was able to get close enough to stand at the base of the tree and watch them eat the seedpods.
Turn up the sound on the video below and hear them crunching seedpods.
I hope you enjoyed seeing these magnificent birds as much as I did. 🙂
After several months with barely a drop of rain, we finally received a decent rainfall on 1st October. It was a sweet sound to hear the raindrops falling on the tin roof and thankfully the rain will provide much needed food for the birds and animals. I quickly discovered that I wasn’t the only one enjoying this change in the weather. About 8 sulphur crested cockatoos suddenly appeared shortly after the rain started, flying around in the sky like lunatics screeching loudly, and landed in the gum trees. I watched them for awhile then realised they looked like they were so joyful about the rain coming, I grabbed my camera and filmed this.
I hope this video made you laugh as much as I did. 😀
Recently I spotted this sulphur crested cockatoo in the loquat tree by the house, being very destructive. Perhaps he hates loquats …….
Awhile ago we had a very exciting event happen at our place when several yellow tailed black cockatoos came for a visit.
We have never seen these cockatoos around here before and have not seen any since.
They just appeared one morning in the old wattle tree near the house. I had gone outside very early and saw movement in the tree and did a double take! I grabbed my camera and captured some video and photos.
These cockatoos are very majestic and it was mesmerising just watching them going about their business. They are actually a lot bigger than I expected.
There were five of them, and they were really getting gung ho ripping off the bark from some of the tree limbs and appeared to be eating some grubs. The poor old wattle tree had been looking very sad for sometime, so we think maybe the grubs had got to it, and the cockatoos have come by and cleaned them all out. It wasn’t long after their visit that we noticed some new growth on the tree. Looks like there’s still some life in it yet.
This video shows one of the cockatoos ripping off the bark. He’s on a mission, this one. You can even hear the cracking sounds as he chews into the branch.
It was so special to be able to experience this, I think it unlikely I will see them again since I came across them by happenstance. It was great to see Nature working in harmony.
It was a busy week for wildlife visitors, not sure why, the weather perhaps, or just that time of year. We had the usual regulars, plus a few infrequent visitors, a visitor who has never been here before, and we also had a very special guest! See who they all are in the photos below.
Here’s our regulars –
Here are a couple of visitors that we don’t see very often –
This is a visitor that is new to our place –
And here is our very special guest –
Sorry about the quality of these last 2 photos, they were taken without a flash in the semi darkness. Mummy possum insists on sitting in the bird feeder just out of reach of the veranda light. I tried to lighten them up a bit. This was the first night out of the pouch for the little joey. He is so tiny and cute! You can see him sniffing and looking around at his strange new world. He is our very special guest this past week and we hope to be seeing more of him and watch grow up. 🙂
My Wild Australia 