Blue cockatoo extinct upgrade#

Johnstone is a member of the national recovery team for all three species of south-west WA’s black cockatoos.

Blue cockatoo extinct upgrade#

Now, we’re getting 20–30, and that information helped us upgrade their conservation status from vulnerable to endangered in 2018.” According to BirdLife figures, this specific population has declined 10% each year. We’d get between 900 and 1,200 birds at some of these roosts in Wongong Valley. “We’ve seen big drop-offs at traditional roost sites that we’ve been monitoring for 25 years. Photograph: animalinfo/Getty Images/iStockphoto He says Baudin’s are surgeons with Marri and Karri nuts and leave very little waste, their calls differ from a Carnaby’s and they’re selective about their roosts, which have to be particularly old.Ĭlose-up of a young Baudin’s white-tailed black cockatoo perching on a thick branch. Western Australian Museum black cockatoo expert Ron Johnstone, unlike most people, knows the Baudin’s well enough to identify them without even looking at them. A lot of our surveyors record them as white-tail black cockies,” rather than specifying, Peck says. “We don’t have as much of an idea about population trends because it’s actually very hard to tell Carnaby’s and Baudin’s apart. The annual Great Cocky Count, a long-term citizen science survey, can barely get a grasp of their population. “They’re less visible, there’s a lot less research on them in comparison to the Carnaby’s and they are much less known, so I think they’re a bit forgotten,” says Adam Peck, black cockatoo project coordinator at Birdlife Australia. On the other hand, the forest-dwelling Baudin’s prefer the protection of a high roost, which makes them a difficult research subject. Carnaby’s can often be found soaring through the urban landscapes of Perth which means people are far more familiar with it, despite low populations. The Baudin’s is by far the least-known of the three black cockatoo species in WA. That we struggle to tell the difference between the two species of white-tailed cockatoo means the much less common Baudin’s could go extinct without most of us even noticing. This may seem significant only to taxonomists, but the mix-up is critical to understanding the challenges facing the Baudin’s today. When the original specimen Lear painted was located, in a collection stowed away in Liverpool in the UK, their suspicions were confirmed: the holotype we’d been referring to for Baudin’s cockatoos was actually painted from a short-billed Carnaby’s cockatoo specimen. The ornithologists wondered, could the specimen Lear painted and named the Baudin’s been a Carnaby’s the entire time? Physically, the one key difference between a Baudin’s and Carnaby’s is its beak: a Baudin’s cockatoo has a long, thin beak in comparison with the Carnaby’s stubby beak. Photograph: Buyenlarge/Getty Imagesĭecades later, Australian ornithologists scrutinised Lear’s bird paintings and noticed the painter had a tendency to exaggerate beak size. Baudin’s Cockatoo, from Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots (1832), by Edward Lear.