Winter Solstice

On this overcast morning of the winter solstice, a flock of Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos (Calyptorhynchus funereus) descended upon a bottlebrush in my front yard, creating a commotion that brought neighbors out of their houses. In a shower of noise, wings clumsily flapping, a dozen or so cockatoos descended upon the tree and tried to settle on branches that were mostly too small to support the weight of a single bird, let alone the trios that attempted to perch together. Swinging from the unsteady tree limbs only increased the decibel of their communal squabble. One or two of the flock momentarily tried to accommodate the chaos by hanging upside down, which would certainly have to be my preferred parrot trick. They stripped off seedpods and bark until a band of white Little Corellas (permanent residents of the park along the Kingston wetlands, located back off my block) got wind of the marauders, and dictatorially chased them off. Black Cockatoos are, in this Terra Psittacorum—land of the parrots, as Australia is sometimes called-- endemics, but so far, I’ve only been able to see them at a distance. Robert Hughes, in "A Fatal Shore," writes that a British settler to Queensland in the early 19th century, likened them to “croaking umbrellas,” and the image is utterly apt. Local lore holds them as harbingers of rain.