One of Australia’s rarest cockatoos has been spotted on the SA mainland for the first time since the 70s

In Deep Creek National Park on the Fleurieu Peninsula, one of Australia’s rarest cockatoos – the South Australian glossy black cockatoo – has been spotted for the first time since the 1970s.

A single male was sighted by avid birdwatcher, Julie Thompson, in the park in late July and another observation has been confirmed in the same location more recently.

The glossy black cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus lathami halmaturinus) was found on mainland SA in the Fleurieu Peninsula prior to the 1970s. But widespread loss of drooping sheoak trees (Allocasuarina verticillata) caused the population to reduce to just 160 individuals confined to Kangaroo Island in the early 1990s.

The black cockatoos have seemingly remained restricted to KI.

“While we’ve had a number of reports of glossy black cockatoos being spotted in the Fleurieu region over the years, none of these have been able to be confirmed,” says Anthony Abley, a Conservation Ecologist at the National Parks and Wildlife Service in the Department for Environment and Water.

“Both of these sightings demonstrate the importance of having an interested and engaged community whose eyes and ears can contribute so much to our understanding of the distributions of our plant and animal species.”

The Kangaroo Island subspecies of the glossy black cockatoo is smaller – but has a bigger bill – than the subspecies found along the east coast of Australia from eastern Queensland to Mallacoota in Victoria.

There have been severe concerns for this subspecies since three quarters of their habitat burned during the 2019-2020 summer bushfires on KI. More than 50% of their feeding habitat and nearly 40% of their nesting sites were located within the 210,000 hectares that burned.

So it seems that they’re still migrating to the mainland from Kangaroo Island, potentially in search of new habitat.

“Glossy black cockatoos feed almost exclusively on the seeds of drooping sheoak trees, and these can be found in pockets in Deep Creek National Park and throughout the Fleurieu region,” says Abley.

The population numbers aren’t helped by the fact that glossy black cockatoos have very low reproductive rates – laying a single egg and only rearing one clutch to fledgling per year.

But thanks to a Recovery Program run by the Kangaroo Island Landscape Board, which among other measures involves planting thousands of drooping sheoks each year to increase feeding habitat and installing and maintaining over 100 nest boxes across the island, the population has been steadily increasing and now sits at around 400 birds.