Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoos

["Philip Veerman" <>]

In 2003 when we had big influxes of these birds, I was working a GPS engineering business at Tennant St Fyshwick, i.e. at the edge of Canberra. On one day over a period of a few hours there was a flock of some 500 Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoos in the trees edging the Molonglo river. As I had the front desk and the whole wall was big full length windows, I could watch the moving crowd whilst sitting on my work desk and hear as flocks passed over but I did go out several times. They kept arriving from the east and continuing on in flocks of 50 or more flying over, the departure of which appeared to make little difference to the number still visible in the trees. The row of trees was a few hundred metres wide and each tree had 20 to 50 birds. Counting was difficult but from memory I think I put 350 as the maximum number at one time for my GBS chart I was doing from there.

 

Probably mentioned before but this influx largely started during the fire. I had several flying over my house at about midnight on 18-1-2003, which up till then was unusual.

 

Philip

 

-----Original Message-----From: martin butterfield [ Sent: Sunday, 7 July 2013 7:12 AM      To: Big Pond
Cc: COG List      Subject: Re: [canberrabirds] Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoos

Judy

Without tracking them it is is impossible to be certain but I would be most surprised if that was the case.  

These birds are common out here feeding in shelter belts of P. radiata and hanging out in the (greatly reduced) pines of Kowen, not too far away.  The big flock was very impressive but I suspect was simply a few of th local groups aggregating for some reason known only to themselves.

Martin

On 7 July 2013 06:57, Big Pond <> wrote:

At 5.10 pm yesterday the biggest flock of YTBCs flew just north of Uriarra Village and stopped at the forest behind Uriarra Station. I'd previously counted 129 but this flock looked larger. Could it be the same lot that you saw Martin? I have no idea how far they travel.

Judy Middlebrook

Sent from my iPad

On 06/07/2013, at 3:45 PM, martin butterfield <> wrote:

This morning about 7:30 a cacophony broke out to our South.  Eventually this resolved to a flock of at least 120 Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoos which carefully flew 50m outside my GBS site and headed off in a generally Northern direction.  They will be entered up as a general record.

This species was the first  I recorded for GBS year 33.  It was a flock of 12 that tree hopped across the site on Wednesday morning.  As well as the usual suspects in the interim, an Eastern Yellow Robin was hunting on the lawn this morning.

--
Martin Butterfield

http://franmart.blogspot.com.au/

--
Martin Butterfield

http://franmart.blogspot.com.au/