The Glossy Black Conservancy is currently looking for volunteers to assist with annual monitoring efforts throughout the north-east NSW and southeast Queensland region. Monitoring routinely takes place with the annual birding day that is held each year, alternating with events in May and October. In addition to this members of the community are encouraged to report sightings of Glossy Black-Cockatoo outside of these specific event days through the online reporting system.
The Glossy Black Conservancy has various training programs and activities that emphasize Community Awareness and education about the Glossy's. You may wish to contact some of the local councils to express your interest in awareness activities.
Go birdwatching in your local area
Glossy Black-Cockatoo are quite widespread but use habitats that provide sufficient foraging resources for them. Target these areas and look and listen for the signs of Glossy Black-Cockatoos, such as chew marks on fallen she-oak cones (orts) and the distinctive sound of cockatoos chewing on the seeds.You can report sightings of birds as well as feeding evidence using the online reporting system.
|| Photo: Cameron Milne
Protect the habitat of the Glossy Black-Cockatoo
If you have she-oaks on your property - don't clear them, they may provide important feeding resources for Glossy Black-Cockatoos now as well as into the future. Glossy Black-Cockatoo are know to return to reliable feeding sites and even specific trees so make sure to retain these trees and surrounding roosting habitat. You can also contribute by planting up new trees to provide resources that might be lost in other areas through ongoing development. See your garden, school grounds or local regeneration site as habitat for the cockatoo and plant Glossy Black-Cockatoo food trees. The property can be big or small, size does not matter.
Habitat trees for roosting and nesting are also particularly important, especially those large old eucalypts with big hollows. Try and retain these trees and keep an eye out to see what animals might be using the hollows. While it is possible to install nest boxes these efforts should not be undertaken without due consideration of issues such as the density of natural hollows in the area, the types of species that might make use of the nest boxes, what type of nest box monitoring program will be undertaken. Nest boxes have certainly been used to good effect in some areas to assist with the recovery of Glossy Black-Cockatoo populations (e.g. Kangaroo Island), but these efforts are supported by intensive monitoring programs.
Photo: Alan Rash
Start, or become involved in a local cockatoo friends group
Improving our knowledge of local populations of Glossy Black-Cockatoo will give us a better understanding of the performance of the regional population of cockatoo. There are already some well known areas that have regular sighitngs being reported by groups of dedicated observers but there coudl be others, they may simply not have been found yet. If you're intersted in getting to know your local birds in a bit more detail the Glossy Black Conservancy can provide some suggestions as to how to develop a monitoring program for your local birds.