Hope Restored for the South Eastern Red-Tailed Black-Cockatoo

Greening Australia has now completed one of the country’s most ambitious land restoration projects to save the iconic South-Eastern Red-Tailed Black-Cockatoo from extinction.

At last count, there were less than 1,400 South-Eastern Red-Tailed Black-Cockatoos left in the wild, with a disturbingly low number of juvenile birds. The decline in numbers has been caused by a range of factors including wildfire, woody weed invasion and historic clearing for agriculture, which have all served to reduce the amount of feeding and nesting habitat available to the dramatic birds.

To help save the endangered cockatoos, Greening Australia has restored trees to over 2,000 hectares of public forests mainly in the Casterton region of south-west Victoria, providing an essential food source and potential new nesting habitat for the birds in the future.

Funded by the Australian Government’s 20 Million Trees Programme (part of the National Landcare Programme), the project saw over 150,000 seedlings put into the ground and over 350,000 direct seeding plots deployed by a novel hand direct seeding methodology, making the project one of the largest effort of its kind ever.

Over 2,000 hectares of public land vegetation is providing a much-needed boost in food and nesting hollows for the Red-Tailed Black Cockatoo. Image: Bob McPherson

“Red-Tailed Black Cockatoos are an iconic and much-loved bird of western Victoria’s shrinking Stringybark and Buloke woodlands. We are extremely proud of the efforts of all involved in making this project a reality.

If plant survival rates are high, it will be a great result for the cockatoos which will give them a much-needed boost in available food resources and in the long-term, more nesting hollows. But there is still much more to be done. We have only just scratched the surface in the fight to provide more food resources for the South-Eastern Red-tailed Black-Cockatoo, and more funding is required to help ensure their long-term survival” says Greening Australia’s Senior Project Officer, Doug Phillips.

Unlike other sub-species of the Red-Tailed Black-Cockatoo, the south-eastern sub-species is an ecological specialist, feeding almost entirely on the seeds of Brown and Desert Stringybark trees. Stringybarks (along with River Redgums) provide critical hollows for nesting which must be located close to the bird’s food sources in order for them to successfully raise their chicks. The trees, which have thick, fibrous bark, grow in nutrient-poor sandy soils and Greening Australia staff were concerned that conventional planting methods would result in high mortalities of plants during the summer/autumn heat onslaught.

To address this, the on-ground team incorporated fertiliser tablets at the bottom of each tubestock planting hole. Fertiliser was also blended into the direct seeding mixture. Extensive seeding mixture trialling indicated that appropriate fertiliser blends accelerated Stringybark seedling growth better equipping plants to survive modern summer/autumn conditions which are becoming hotter and drier compared to long-term averages.

Greening Australia’s Regional Manager Dave Warne says this project has been ground-breaking in every sense of the word. “It challenged conventional thinking, requiring us to use considerable innovation in deployment methodologies and the use of planting amendments.”

An eight-man direct seeding crew was able to cover up to 80 hectares of degraded woodland each day, a significant output often conducted in challenging terrain.

The cockatoos are not the only beneficiaries of the project, with nationally endangered animals including the Southern Brown Bandicoot and the Long-nosed Potoroo also set to reap the rewards of restored habitat.

The fight to save these iconic birds is not over yet and further funding is required to ensure their survival. If you would like to help bring these beautiful birds back home, you can donate to the project through the Great Southern Landscapes program.