![]() Glossies need tall eucalypts with suitably sized nest-hollows for breeding. If the birds survived the fires then their nearest unburned feeding areas may well be the less Allocasuarina-rich parts of the island’s eastern end. We just don’t know the details yet. On Kangaroo Island, Glossy strongholds are precisely the areas that have been burned on the north and west coasts of the island. Glossy Black-Cockatoos on Kangaroo Island If bushfires had always been as intense as the current ones, we probably would not have Glossy Black-Cockatoos as we know them. This can have a truly devastating effect on the food supply of Glossies, both immediately and for years afterwards. Intense bushfires can wipe out feeding habitat rather than leaving a mosaic of burned and unburned areas. It's not surprising that suitable female food trees are always patchily distributed.Īllocasuarina trees take ten years or more to produce cones and even longer to have branches thick enough to support the weight of a Glossy trying to feed. Allocasuarina trees have probably not taken this kind of predation without an evolutionary fight. The birds spend hours every day extracting the seeds from the closed valves of these cones. The seeds that Glossies eat are produced only by female trees. littoralis (just about everywhere else).Īllocasuarina trees are dioecious, meaning that male and female trees are separate individual trees. verticillata (on Kangaroo Island and in the Riverina) and A. Their primary food trees are the species A. They feed almost solely on the seeds of casuarina trees in the genus Allocasuarina, not the more familiar river casuarinas such as Casuarina cunninghamiana. Glossies are among the most diet-specialised birds in the world. Glossy Black-Cockatoo feeding on casuarina seeds (Source: Brian McCauley, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) They are emblematic of the Bassian species that the current bushfire crisis will be severely impacting. They live in the part of the continent known biogeographically as the Bassian subregion or province. Glossies are almost completely confined to south-eastern Australia. They are likely to have been severely impacted by the Australian bushfires. They have been recorded near Paluma in the Wet Tropics of far north Queensland.Īn isolated population of several hundred Glossies lives on Kangaroo Island. Glossies occur from south-eastern Queensland to Mallacoota, extending west to the Riverina and Narrabri in New South Wales. Least familiar among them is the Glossy Black-Cockatoo, Calyptorhynchus lathami. (Source: lostandcold, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)īlack-cockatoos are among Australians’ most beloved birds. The female in the centre has yellow markings on her head.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |