Tucked away high in the branches of a white gum tree at Murdoch University, in a painstakingly designed nesting box, is the bundle of feathers that set Ron Johnstone’s heart racing.
The endangered forest red-tailed black cockatoo chick was the first hatching in suburban Perth in his 15 years of research, as well as the first time the birds had bred in an artificial nest.
“It was quite staggering to us,” Adjunct Professor Johnstone, curator of ornithology at the WA Museum, said.
“These birds used to be found all the way out to New Norcia and Dandaragan but they have declined enormously in number.
"There has been no breeding at all in the Perth metropolitan area. We’ve been refining the design [of the nest boxes] for years and now we have one that has worked out.”
Today, Professor Johnstone took DNA samples from the chick and banded its leg, encouraging people to report sightings of the birds.
The red-tailed cockatoos, unique to the south-west, only number between 10,000 and 12,000 and are more endangered than the more well-known Carnaby’s black cockatoo, he said.
They mated for life and were not prolific breeders, only laying one egg every two to three years.
They preferred to stay in the forest, nesting in the hollows of trees that were hundreds of years old. But as those hollows and food supplies dwindled, the cockatoos had started venturing onto the coastal plain to forage, Professor Johnstone said.
Early last year, the birds began staying at the Murdoch campus, instead of returning to the forest to roost.
Manager of the university’s environmental program, Caroline Minton, said they planted corridors of suitable vegetation to encourage the birds and put up 11 nest boxes since 2009. The recent Great Cocky Count put the university’s number of resident birds at almost 100.
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