Birds are finding a home in Australia’s largest city
SYDNEY — The bushy pair of laughing kookaburras that used to show up outside my daughter’s bedroom window disappeared a few months ago.
The birds simply vanished — after rudely waking us every morning with their maniacal “kookoo-kah-KAH-KAH” call, after my kids named them Ferrari and Lamborghini and after we learned that kookaburras mate for life.
And here’s the odd thing: I missed them. This is not normal, at least not for me, but Sydney has a rare superpower: It turns urbanites into bird people, and birds into urbanites. Few other cities of its size (5 million and counting) can even come close to matching Sydney’s still-growing population of bold, adaptable and brightly colored squawkers.
“We’ve got a lot of large conspicuous native birds that are doing well, and that is very unusual globally,” said Richard Major, the principal research scientist in ornithology for the Australian Museum in Sydney. “It’s quite different in other cities around the world.”
A walk to the car or train may require dodging attacking magpies, and rarely does a week go by without seeing a sulphur-crested cockatoo, or a dozen, spinning on a wire like an escaped circus act.
Even the local scavenger is extraordinary. The white ibis, known here as a “bin chicken,” is a hefty, prehistoric-looking creature with a curved beak.
Even as ornithologists point out that some small birds are struggling in the city, they note that a generation or two ago, Sydney didn’t have nearly as much avian diversity as it does today, nor as many flocks of birds that have mastered what city living requires: competitiveness, an obsession with real estate and the ability to adapt.
Why so many birds are thriving here is increasingly a subject of international study. Scientists believe it is due in part to how Sydney was settled — relatively recently, compared with many global cities, with less intrusion into wildlife habitats.
The luck of local terrain has helped. Sydney’s rocky coastline didn’t lend itself to clearing land for agriculture, which slowed development and left lots of native plants untouched. Australia’s early leaders also set up large national parks near Sydney, protecting bushland for animals of all kinds.
That afternoon, I went for a walk in the city’s Centennial Parklands with John Martin, an ornithologist with the University of New South Wales who is working on a project looking at how Sydney’s cockatoos have adapted, learning to open garbage bins and knock on windows to ask people for food. Martin walked over to one of the ponds where ducks and other birds gather. He pointed out a white ibis with a yellow plastic number tag on its wing.
Researchers eventually discovered that the white ibis loves carbohydrates, making it a match for a city of fish and chips. But the big birds also moved to Sydney because their natural wetland habitat further inland had been dried out by drought and heavyhanded water management.