Animal · Australia, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia
Sulphur-crested cockatoo
Cacatua galerita — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The sulphur-crested cockatoo is a big white parrot that raises a yellow crest like a fan, and its screech carries right across a valley. In Sydney these birds have taught one another to open rubbish bins.
Picture credit: TWILIGHT-WP (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Tanya Dropbear (CC BY 2.0) · Hardeep Singh (CC BY 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the sulphur-crested cockatoo live?
Home: Forests, farmland and city parks in Australia.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Australia, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, New Zealand.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 44-55 cm long, with a yellow crest. It weighs about 0.85 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
Sulphur-crested cockatoos are among the longest-lived birds that people keep. In the wild they can reach forty years, and birds in cages have passed seventy. They eat seeds, roots, fruit, flowers and insects, often digging on the ground, and while the flock feeds one bird sits in a bare tree and watches. Its alarm call empties the ground in seconds, and in Australia a human lookout is still called a cockatoo. In Sydney some birds worked out how to lift a wheelie-bin lid, walk it open and help themselves, and researchers followed the trick as it spread from suburb to suburb. Instead of oiling their feathers, cockatoos make a fine powder that keeps the plumage dry.
Find it on the globe
Sulphur-crested cockatoo is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How long does a cockatoo live?
In the wild a sulphur-crested cockatoo can reach about forty years. Kept by people, where no predator hunts it, some have lived past seventy, which puts them among the longest-lived of all pet birds.
Why does a cockatoo raise its crest?
The crest goes up when the bird is excited, startled or showing off to another cockatoo. Folded flat against the head it usually means the bird is calm.
Do cockatoos really open rubbish bins?
Yes. In Sydney cockatoos learned to lift a bin lid with the beak, walk along the rim and flip it over. Researchers followed the trick as it spread from suburb to suburb, because birds copied their neighbours.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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