A Major Problem

Victoria’s only significant population of Major Mitchell’s cockatoos is in terminal decline. Can a groundbreaking new approach save the birds?

- Bron Willis

VICTOR HURLEY PULLS his four-wheel-drive up next to a solitary tree, its barren, lifeless limbs stretching dramatically upwards. The surround-ing mallee landscape is vast, the sky above is wide and clear. Victor, an ecologist who has spent a lifetime studying birds, climbs out of the vehicle, reaches for a pole with a video camera artfully attached to its tip and extends it 10m above him until it rests at the opening of a hollow in the tree. He’s searching for signs of Major Mitchell’s cockatoo, a bird pioneering ornithologist John Gould once described as “the most beautiful parrot in the world”.

Although widely distributed across arid and semi-arid inland areas of Australia, the species is in serious decline in Victoria, where it’s been listed as vulnerable since 1988. The state’s most significant remaining population is at Pine Plains in Wyperfeld National Park, 3570sq.km of parkland in the heart of mallee country about 400km north-west of Melbourne. But even here, it’s only just holding on; numbers having slid from 62 breeding pairs in 1998 to just 20 in 2017, with a 30 per cent decline in the past year alone.

Victor and his assistant, fellow ecologist Louise Durkin, peer at a monitor, assessing the contents of the deep hollow. Like Victor, Louise is here on her own time. Victorian government funding for Victor’s monitoring program, which had been underway for 17 years, was cut three years ago. It now operates on the generosity of a few concerned individuals.

The tree they’re monitoring is a 120-year-old slender cypress pine (Callitris gracilis), the only tree species in which majors nest at Pine Plains. (In two decades, Victor has only ever once seen a major nest in any other tree species here.) It’s no surprise then that the birds’ alarming decline at Pine Plains is intrinsically linked to the local decline of slender cypress pines.