Today I installed another Black Cockatoo nesting box, this one on my friend Jeff's block, which adjoins the Porongurup National Park just east of Mount Barker in Western Australia's south-west. Jeff and I made the box from his Nanna's old wardrobe, and some off-cuts of form-ply that I salvaged from a rubbish collection, earlier this year, and today headed south to put it into the wild. We selected a tall Karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor) in which to place the box and I set up ropes to haul it into place.
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| The Cockatoo nest-box is hauled up using a locking pulley system. |
Drizzly rain covered our campsite soon after the box had been secured, so we took refuge under a camp shelter and drank some port as the afternoon turned to evening. Just before dark, we noticed a pair of Carnaby's Cockatoos (Calyptorhynchus latriostris) sail in and land next to a small, slit-like entrance to a hollow in another Karri tree, close to where the nest-box had been installed. Our friends Graham and Kerry were also down camping with us and the four of us watching through drizzly showers as the pair perched near the tree-hollow, with rain dripping off their slender bodies.
Continued observation led us to learn this pair actually had a small chick inside, which we heard them feeding that evening, and again the next morning - a super exciting discovery! Hopefully this breeding activity means the prospects of our new nesting box becoming occupied by this endangered cockatoo are high!
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| Camping with friends and is a great way to spend the end of the year. |
