Louts spill over to the peaceful seaside town of Lorne, on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. With their rickshaws undulating, they followed the gang, loitering for hours on the main strip and shouting obscenities at passersby. Occasionally, a particularly daring specimen will approach a diner having lunch outdoors, leaning over and stealing a French fry from their plate. The warning signs discourage them.
These foul-mouthed thugs are, well, a chicken. They are sulfur-crested cockatoos – a popular pet in the United States – and macaws, a relative of macaws that lack the distinctive yellow plumage and appear to be suffering from a severe case of conjunctivitis. . Pink-breasted galahs complete the cockatoos trio.
There’s a lot to love about these charismatic birds. They have character and are extremely intelligent. Natural problem solvers, they’ve been known make tools and, in some rare cases, dance to music of different tempos. They live for decades, mate for life, and love to play and spin like string performers.
Fascinating world of birds
But you can have too many good things. And in some parts of Australia, hundreds or even thousands of birds fly in unwanted places, sometimes leaving a trail of destruction upon their wake.
The farmer despises the birds for the damage they cause. The inhabitants of the streets to which they had emigrated were in despair at the constant cry of anguish. In Melbourne, they strut their stuff with an exclusive riverside atmosphere. In Sydney, they have take up residence on the sparkling waterfront. Although not migrants, they have established a community on the western edge of Australia, in Perth.
Of course, none of this is cockatoos’ fault. During the 20th century, large tracts of land in Australia were cleared for farming, robbing birds of their habitat and forcing them to change their diet, which consisted mainly of native yams, to combination of grains and weeds. Next, in the 1950s, an introduced myxomatosis virus leveled the rabbit population, reducing competition for grain and helping cockatoo populations flourish. More recently, flocks of livestock and an abundance of human leftovers have increased breeding populations.
It is difficult to know how to solve this hairy problem. Although their populations may be thriving, galahs, longbills and sulfur cockatoos are native wildlife and they are protected by law. Breeders must not attempt to frighten, disperse or destroy cockatoos without permission from the state. Non-lethal methods hardly worked: Attempts to use drones to scare them off failed when the birds realized they weren’t threatened and moved on.
When councils switched to gas or bird traps, some citizens were quietly, and illegitimately, dealing with their own problems. This week, more than 100 child cores found to be infected in northern Victoria. In 2019, dozens of cores of plunge to the ground in Adelaide after a suspected poisoning case. Last year, over 250 sulfur cockatoos died from poisoning with omethoate, a common agrochemical, in north-east Victoria.
Under certain circumstances, often related to the amount of damage they cause, they can be shot dead in sight, but ornithologists warn that doing so could break ties. long-term cooperation and put undue stress on birds simply trying to make it through in a changed world.
“Killing them can cause years of loving relationships to break down and really take their toll on the species,” said Gisela Kaplan, an ornithologist at the University of New England. told The Age newspaper. She suggests using birds of prey to frighten them or establishing “sanctuaries” as more humane alternatives.
And now this week’s stories.
Australia and New Zealand
