The videos mentioned above often depict cockatoos in a very excited state.

Don’t allow your cockatoo to become over-excited.I will put money on the fact that those videos depict the day’s best 3 minutes with that bird and that the endings of some of the videos were edited out.įor anyone considering a cockatoo, I want to offer three pieces of advice that might help you avoid ruining your life and the life of your new cockatoo. There is an abundance of very entertaining videos posted all over that make life with a cockatoo appear to be the most fun a human could ever hope for with a companion animal. As it turns out, the traits that make us fall in love with cockatoos are the same ones that cause their behavior problems and land them in rescues everywhere. There are specific traits that they have that make it nearly impossible to avoid anthropomorphizing their behavior. The cockatoo, specifically the white ones, are parrots that excel at pulling on our heartstrings. However, our humanness is also the very thing that makes us try so hard to get it right. One of the biggest struggles we have in doing things right for our parrots is with our humanness because it makes something that should be completely natural feel like work. It is even harder to WANT to see things from their perspective because sometimes it is a harsh look at the realities of nature.Īnthropomorphizing is a hole we don’t want to fall into. However, we are human, and it is hard to see things from a parrot’s perspective. The “fort” is a nest and the bird is definitely not playing. It has nothing to do with having found their other half. In reality parrots choose mates based on their ability to produce healthy chicks and defend their nest. However, when we allow ourselves that convenience it causes us to make mistakes in our care for our parrots, such as allowing them to “play” in a “fort” they are building inside a dark cabinet. An example of this would be the presumption that parrots fall in love like humans do based on the fact that they choose a mate for life.Īnthropomorphizing is a tool that many humans use to try to make sense of things that they don’t understand. It means to assign human traits to things that are not human, such as a parrot. Find out more about this, the largest temperate woodlands in the world here.If you are the kind of person who has scoured the internet to learn everything available about your parrot, you have no doubt come across this word “anthropomorphism”. Their tail bands are a solid scarlet red.īoth Carnaby’s and Red-tailed Black-Cockatoos can be found in the Great western Woodlands. Young males emerge from the nest three months after hatching looking like their mothers but as they mature at about three years of age, their pure black adult feathers emerge. Their tails are like the colours of the sunset from yellow, orange to red. Females’ bodies are covered in black feathers edged in gold while their heads carry yellow spots. The highly decorative plumage of the Red-tailed Black-Cockatoo make it a favourite amongst bird watchers. Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoos are also declining due to urban expansion. This migratory species is declining rapidly due to the loss of around 87% of its woodland breeding habitat and as a result is listed as endangered.

This includes the endangered Carnaby’s Black-Cockatoo of south-west Western Australia. Six Australian species are predominantly black.

Umbrella cockatoo lifespan in wild