Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos also like tasty grubs. Image by Marj KibbyOver recent year Ballarat has had more and more visits by black cockatoos.
These birds are yellow-tailed black cockatoos. They are now visiting the urban areas as well as the surrounding rural and semi-rural places.
Last winter was the first time I had heard of them actually perching on buildings. One or two did this while the others of their group fed on seeds of hakea shrubs.
Now the cockatoos have found another food in urban areas. Apples. A few readers have reported black cockatoos feeding on their apples. I have not previously known the birds to do this.
Yellow-tailed black cockatoos normally feed on seeds of pines, banksias and hakeas. This is what has been attracting them to suburban gardens over the past few years. Now, however, they have been after apple seeds.
Unlike sulphur-crested cockatoos, which - like rosellas and lorikeets - eat the flesh of the apple, the black cockatoo takes just the immature seeds, discarding and wasting the fleshy part of the fruit.
It would be interesting to know how the first cockatoos discovered the seeds in the centre of the fleshy fruit.
Why the increase in visits to Ballarat? A reader has suggested that the birds are seeking other food sources because many of our local pine plantations have been harvested, resulting in fewer pine seeds being available.
Whatever the reason, the big birds are certainly visiting household gardens more frequently than they did in the past. They had almost never stopped in home gardens in suburbia here until the last ten years or so.
Although our local black cockatoos have traditionally fed on seeds of pines, hakeas and banksias, their choice of foods elsewhere is wide.
One of my textbooks says they feed on “seeds of introduced trees and shrubs, as well as grass seeds, nuts, berries, fruit, nectar, blossoms and insects and their larvae.” I can find no specific reference to apple seeds.