Sulphur-crested Cockatoo and Australian White Ibis
Research is currently under way that involves wing-tagging sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita) within the Sydney region. The aim is to monitor cockatoo movements, breeding and habitat preferences.
Report your cockatoo sighting
If you see a wing-tagged cockatoo please report the tag number and colour (e.g. 142-green or 011-yellow) and location in one of these ways:
Supporting our research
Donate here
Donated funds will be used to conduct GPS tracking and to maintain the iApp and database. The GPS tracking aims to learn more about the cockatoos' foraging behaviour. From the resighting data of wing-tagged birds we have learnt a lot about the birds' movements and in particular their foraging movements within urban areas. However, we have recorded few records of the birds using natural areas; for the obvious reason that few people are in these areas to record the birds' presence. With the GPS transmitters we will quantify if the birds use urban areas more frequently than natural areas. The transmitters we are using weigh 20 g (this equates to ~2.5% of the mass of a 800 g cockatoo), are solar powered and recorded a GPS position up to every 15 minutes. The data collected is transmitted via the GSM mobile phone network each day so we can see in almost real-time the birds movements. We plan to track existing tagged birds to compare their known movements from reported sightings with the GPS movement data. We plan to track individual birds for a short period (e.g. 1-3 months) and then recapture the bird and remove the transmitter.