red-tailed black cockatoo

An over-abundance of masculinity

by jmgoyder

I just figured out why there is suddenly so much squabbling amongst our birds; there are too many males! I decided to do a count today and here are the statistics:

four roosters (no hens);
one golden pheasant (no females);
ten peacocks (five peahens);
two drakes (two ducks);
five ganders (two geese);
one emu (two emuettes);
two turkey toms (one female); and
one weiro.

The fact that we also have two male alpacas and two male dogs means that, if you include Son and me in the equation, and not counting the twelve gender-defying guinnea fowl, we roughly have a ratio of 3 to 1 in favour of the male presence here. It is definitely time to get some more hens!

I figure if there is more of a female presence here, Godfrey will stop trying to lord it over me!

Note: We did have a lot of hens but the fox got them so now I have a better yard, with higher fences. I hope this works!

Wings

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Waste not, want not

by jmgoyder

The other day, when I was taking the emus for a walk around and around and around the garden (a previous post describes this marathon!) one of them spied a bottle cap in the grass and promptly gulped it down before I could stop him.

Let me explain: usually our lawn is not strewn with bottle caps, however, having cleaned up after Son’s 18th birthday party, I had missed several of these, some of which had been thrown into bushes or potplants.

Anyway, I was alarmed as, one by one, all of the emus found and swallowed a bottle cap each as if they were on a treasure hunt. They kept hunting for more as if bottle caps were some sort of rare delicacy. I wrestled a couple of these sharp metal caps out of sharp beaks and then got down on my hands and knees and quickly picked up the remainder. When I did this, the Emerys all stood back and watched me as if they thought I was trying to be one of them. The cheekiest one kept trying to grab the caps out of my hand!

There is a lesson here: birds like shiny objects and are attracted to aluminium, plastic, glass, jewelry and anything reflective, so you have to be very careful. Since the bottle cap incident I have been terribly worried that one or all of the Emerys might get sick, but so far so good. I have been giving them plenty of cabbage to make sure! Hopefully the cabbage will provide the roughage required to eradicate the bottle caps (I will not go into detail here about my search for digested bottle caps!)

This has made me realize, too, how the littering around the countryside is probably killing some of the wild birds. We live on a very short road and yet, last week, Son and I collected a garbage bagful of cans, bottles and plastic bags (some empty, some full) that had been dumped here and there on the sides of this road. This probably happens in every country’s countryside – awful.

Other recent realizations:

Weiros like cardboard. Buttons has now chewed through nearly a whole pizza box. Yeah, he wasn’t interested in the leftover pizza at all, only the boxes. He is getting fat! Don’t worry, we have now taken the rest of the pizza boxes to the local dump.

Red-tailed black cockatoos like anything and everything chewable. Wantok particularly enjoyed power cords, furniture, Abs exercise machines and, before we set her free, human fingers and especially thumbs! I imagine that, by now, she will have eaten a good part of the forest in the hills! Any cockatoo who can eat a wooden chair in one sitting, can eat a tree or two easily! I don’t miss the furniture, which was old anyway, but I do miss Wantok!

I miss a lot of things….

Wings

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A beautiful black cloud

by jmgoyder

I found a Youtube that shows exactly what happened when we let Wantok go. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJZnQ2QFgq4&feature=topics

Then I found another one of an Australian couple releasing a red-tailed black cockatoo into the wild and this was very reassuring because I was worried Wantok wouldn’t be able to find a group. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8pmpD62lg&feature=endscreen&NR=1

When we first acquired Wantok, one of Son’s friends came over and I was showing her off, saying she was an endangered species, but he told me that where he lives (about 7 kilometres east of here up in the hills) there are red-tailed black cockatoos everywhere. Of course I felt a little silly then! Anyway that’s where I’m sure Wantok must have gone as it is an area of dense bush, a beautiful habitat.

A weird thing happened yesterday. I heard Wantok’s distinctive cry except it was multiplied and, looking up, I watched in awe as a beautiful black cloud of red-tailed black cockatoos flew across the farm, very high up in the sky. This has never happened before and I was so amazed it took me a moment to get my voice to call out “Wantok?” but as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone.

We have definitely done the right thing.

Wings

14 Comments »

Wantok wings away

by jmgoyder

Today is bittersweet because Wantok has flown away to her freedom, and I am numb with shock. This is what happened.

Son and I returned from visiting Husband in the hospital yesterday afternoon, to find that Wantok had begun to chew away the electrical power points in the veranda, so Son and I then had an argument about what to do with her.

Son: She wants to be free or she wouldn’t be getting so out of control.

Me: I told you I’ve ordered the aviary. We just have to wait a couple of weeks for it to be built.

Son: That’s not freedom. Look at her. She wants to fly, Mum – really fly. (Wantok was swooping back and forth above our heads).

Me: She can fly in here – she flies up and down the veranda all day. (I ducked as Wantok’s wings fanned my hair).

Son: And that’s normal, is it, for a huge, wild cockatoo to spend its life flying inside a room.

Me: Well, no.

Son: Same thing goes for the stupid aviary idea. She’ll still be trapped. I thought you didn’t agree with caging birds.

Me: I guess I thought she’d be more tameable and she could come in and out….

Son: Plus she’s started biting us – that means she’s not happy. And she stares out the window a lot. (As if to demonstrate this, Wantok settled on top of her cage and stared out the window at the peacocks.)

Me: So what do you want to do?

Son: I want to take her outside and see what happens.

Me: Okay, but if she flies off you have to follow her.

Son: Are you sure?

Me: No, but you obviously are.

So then Son went up to Wantok and she climbed onto his shoulder, then he walked to the veranda door, opened it and went outside. For a moment or so, Wantok took in the new situation, then seemed to take a deep breath and, in a whoosh of wings, she was off, uttering loud, guttural cries of joy.

I watched Son run after her, but less than a minute later he was back looking appalled.

Son: Mum, she was too fast. She’s already halfway to the hills. I lost sight of her. Oh no, what have I done? (He was close to tears).

Me: You’ve set her free. (I could feel a sliver of my heart peel away).

Oh, I hope we’ve done the right thing. There are wild cockatoos up in the hills and I feel sure she will find them and make friends with other wantoks and be much happier. Maybe she will come back and visit.

Maybe.

I am bereft.

Wings

16 Comments »

Leftovers

by jmgoyder

What I mean by ‘leftovers’ here consists of the things I have forgotten to mention in previous posts – for example:

1. Many of the photos I now use, to accompany my little stories, were taken randomly before I even knew what a blog was.

2. None of the photos I’ve taken since I started this blog have been ‘staged’; even the Ouch post was a spontaneous series of photos.

3. I am trying to take better photos with my new camera but I don’t seem to have the visual instinct required – will keep trying!

4. Weiros grind their teeth/beaks and I mean GRIND! Buttons is on my shoulder doing it now and it’s actually quite noisy and annoying!

5. Argh – Wantok is doing it now – that GRINDING thing! She does it quite loudly too.

6. I think Buttons might be a boy because apparently her/his big, round, orange cheeks indicate maleness and might explain why he is so enamoured of me (his beak under my chin right now, left eye curved up to meet mine, lots of snuggling).

7. Despite Son’s reluctance to embrace the ‘bird thing’, as he calls it, he and Wantok are so infatuated with each other that I feel a bit left out!

8. I am meticulous about grammar so sometimes I go back and edit past posts for posterity. I’m not sure if this is normal, but who cares. On the other hand, does anyone else do this?

9. WordPress is incredible in many ways but there are definitely a few glitches and I seem to keep falling into ALL of them!

10. Even though I am not lonely, or isolated, it is great to be meeting other bloggers who are wiser than I am.

11. This 11 is just to break up 10’s domination and just to say that, even though I said at the outset that there would be a photo with every post, it’s not always possible.

12. Husband comes home from hospital on Friday – yeeha!

Wings

10 Comments »

Ouch!

by jmgoyder

Wantok: Wow, Buttons, I’ve never done this before. How do you keep your balance?

Buttons: Just dig your claws in. That’s what I do.

Wantok: Oh, okay.

Button: Is that better?

Wantok: Much better, although he just made an ‘ouch’ noise.

Buttons: Oh don’t worry about that. You probably hurt him a bit. They have really thin skin, these humans.

Wantok: Yeah, this one has an enormous head too. I can’t even see you over there. Wait, I’ll just change my position a bit.

Son: OUCH!

Wantok: Whoops, I think I hurt him again. What should I do? I feel awful.

Buttons: He’ll be all right. Just give him a little kiss. He quite likes that.

Wantok: Oh, okay. Good idea.

Wings

14 Comments »

Cockatoo eats Ab swing

by jmgoyder

The most wonderful thing is happening! Every day, Wantok is eating, mutilating and destroying a little bit more of my Ab swing (you know those exercise machines that are supposed to give you a flat stomach in a few days).

Okay, I bought this Ab swing thing a couple of years ago but it hasn’t worked. Apparently, according to the instructions, you have to use it for it to work and, even though I’ve used it quite a bit in my imagination, I still haven’t actually climbed onto it and done what the flat-stomached young woman in the dvd does.

So the fact that Wantok is destroying it is a bit of a guilty relief. She’s nearly finished with the handles and the foot bits of this contraption (which are rubber) and now she has begun on the steel base. She should have it completely obliterated by New Year’s Eve which will be great because then I won’t have to make that particular resolution again – yeeha!

Oh, Wantok, how I love you! Do you know, she even has Buttons chomping away at the more easily destroyable bits of the Ab swing. They are such a great team!

Wings

10 Comments »

Has anyone seen my boots?

by jmgoyder

Wantok, our red-tailed black cockatoo, is literally eating the house. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration but let’s put it this way: she has taken a bite out of every single biteable object in our veranda – every chair, every shoe, every everything!

These were once my favourite boots! They were quite worn out anyway but they were wearable. Oh, she acts all innocent if I approach her. In fact right now, I am watching her from my office at the other end of the veranda and she is chewing the less damaged boot but twice now I have tried to take a photo of her in the act and she steps aside as if to say, ‘it wasn’t me!’

During her first week with us she chewed through three of her wooden perches after which I left her cage door open and now she won’t go back in there; the veranda has become her domain and she sleeps on top of her cage rather than inside it. I suppose it must be rather wonderful having this kind of freedom as, before we acquired her, she had never been outside a cage.

When Husband, his mother and brother first moved here some half century ago, one of the first things they did was to enclose this back veranda with windows so it is a perfect place for Wantok because the windows make it feel like outside but she is safe. The drawback for us, though, is that she is making one hell of a mess, so we are now considering an aviary after all. It’ll have to be a huge one though, to match the size of this veranda, but that way she will be outside (which I’m sure she’d prefer) and we will get our veranda back. I’m not sure; ideally I want to let Wantok out so she can fly more freely, but I’m afraid she might fly away. I have ordered a mate for her but he won’t arrive until March next year.

Any advice appreciated.

Or boot donations!

Wings

6 Comments »

A picture worth a thousand birds

by jmgoyder

The above is a photo of a lithograph by John Gould (information link below). It was emailed to me by the gallery exhibiting and selling some of his work this week. Having bought a couple of lithographs from this gallery over the years, we were on their mailing list so I thought it was an extraordinary cooincidence to receive an invitation that featured this famous picture of a red-tailed black cockatoo just days after I had acquired Wantok. As I had paid a small fortune for her, I now wondered if it might have been wiser to simply buy a picture – this picture.

I’m not stupid, but I am a bit naive. Wantok cost a bit, but guess what this picture was priced at?

$27,500AUS

I think I’ll just frame the invitation picture!

Or maybe not; after all, I have the real thing – I have Wantok!

http://australianmuseum.net.au/The-Gould-League-of-Bird-Lovers