Conservationists are planting trees to lure the endangered glossy black cockatoo back to the South Australian mainland, where it has been extinct for decades.
Now, Greening Australia and the WWF Australia are planting almost 20,000 trees in the hope of tempting the birds across Backstairs Passage to the Fleurieu Peninsula.
“If we plant it, hopefully they will come, make little cockatoo babies and then spread out and multiply,” the Greening Australia senior program officer, Andrew Woodroffe, said.
Glossy black cockatoos are the smallest of Australia’s black cockatoo species.
“Greening Australia and WWF are rebuilding quality habitat and we’re really excited that this could potentially bring glossy black cockatoos back to the mainland,” he said.
https://www.greeningaustralia.org.au/enticing-kangaroo-island-glossy-black-cockatoo/
Kangaroo Island is the last refuge for the South Australian subspecies of glossy black-cockatoo - which is smaller but has a bigger bill than glossies in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.
In 1995 the subspecies was heading towards extinction with fewer than 200 SA glossies left on Kangaroo Island.
The Kangaroo Island Glossy Black-Cockatoo Recovery Program, with local community support, turned that around boosting the population to about 454 by 2020.
The fires highlighted an urgent need to reestablish habitat for glossies on the Fleurieu Peninsula, just across from Kangaroo Island.
The glossy flock on eastern Kangaroo Island, unaffected by the fires and closer to the Fleurieu, continues to grow and it is hoped they will expand their range across Backstairs Passage if enough habitat is created.
