Living with a cockatoo
The crest says it all
Nothing else in your house has a better mood indicator. Crest up means excited, startled, or extremely pleased to see you, and with a cockatoo those are frequently the same state. The raised crest is the family signature, the thing that separates cockatoos from every other parrot. The other half of the signature is volume, and you already know about that part.
They are all cockatoos and none of them are the same
This is where gift buying goes wrong. Cockatoos run from roughly 30 to 60 centimeters, the distance between a cockatiel you can hold in one hand and a palm cockatoo pushing 1.2 kilos. A galah person and a Moluccan person do not have the same bird, the same house, or the same relationship with their skirting boards. Hand one of them the other’s shirt and they will be very gracious about it, and they will absolutely notice.
The dust is real
Cockatoos do not have the oil gland most birds preen with. They make their own fine powder from specialised down feathers instead, and work it through the plumage as waterproofing. Excellent for the bird. Less excellent for your black hoodie, your laptop screen and every dark surface within about three metres. Cockatoo people buy lint rollers in bulk and stop bringing it up.
Yes, the cockatiel counts
Cockatiels are real cockatoos, filed in their own subfamily at the small end of the family, and they come with the full kit: the erectile crest, the powder down, the facial feathers covering the sides of the beak. Smallest member, same equipment, a fraction of the noise.
This is a long arrangement
Sulphur-crested have reached eighty in captivity. The record holder was a Major Mitchell’s called Cookie, at least 82 years and 88 days old when he died at Brookfield Zoo in 2016, having arrived there in 1934. That is less a pet than a clause in your will. Cockatoo owners tend to describe theirs the way other people describe a lifelong roommate.
Cleverer than the bin lid suggests
In Sydney, sulphur-cresteds worked out how to flip open wheelie bins, and researchers tracked the trick spreading suburb by suburb as birds copied their neighbours, with different opening styles in different areas. Male palm cockatoos break off a branch, trim it to about 20 centimeters and drum with it, each male keeping his own rhythm. Goffin’s cockatoos make and carry whole tool sets. None of this makes them easier to live with.
One of them needs help
The umbrella cockatoo, the big white one everybody pictures, has been uplisted to Endangered after forest loss and continued illegal trapping. Its neighbour the salmon-crested, better known as the Moluccan, is Endangered as well, with thousands still taken from the wild every year for the domestic bird trade.
