Poor old trees. If its not one thing, its another.

The last few weeks we have had huge flocks of yellow-tailed black cockatoos coming through. Its a regular event...the weather gets cold, or rainy, and the cockatoos fly down the mountains, along the Ovens River, stopping along the way to forage. When the weather clears up they fly back the other way.

Normally its small groups...seven, three...always an odd/prime number! But the last few weeks its has been huge groups. One cluster was about 150 birds. I am not exaggerating. I am good at counting groups. I used to do fish surveys for a marine diversity-mapping project, and can count large schools of fast moving fish. Flocks of birds are the same thing, except the raucous bird flocks move slowly. They fly so slowly they look like they will drop out of the sky....easy to count!

I don't know if its a good thing or bad. Is it good that the numbers have increased? Or does it mean they are being pushed out of their normal habitat? We don't see kangaroos here often, they have too many farms to get through to get to us, and only one bridge to get across the river from the National Park. But after the bushfires, and then again after the backburning last year, kangaroos showed up after their habitat was burnt out. So maybe that's what's going on with the cockies. They are beautiful birds, and welcome here, but they wreak havoc.

Part of their foraging is to pick at trees and dig out grubs. The wattles are particularly susceptible to wood grubs. The cockies gouge with their massive beaks and shred the timber, often going quite deep.

Old wattle has been compeltely whittled down on most branches.

The base of the tree shows the ground littered with shredded sticks of timber.

But there has been so many of them that they have exhausted the normal food supply, and they are ...branching out.

We have ancient apple box, big red gums. The cockies get stuck into these old, big branches, gouge enough out of them to weaken the branch, and down it comes.

My bottom paddock is littered with broken branches, some quite big.

But today I went into the tree paddock. This is a dump of mining spoil which we are slowly converting to a native forest. I don't go in there as often as I should, the gate is a bit annoying. But I was in there planting some new saplings, and cutting some lower branches to make it easier to get through in a vehicle.

And I found these two blue gums. Mature, more than 12 years old. One has two trunks, the other a single trunk. But both have been severely shredded to the point of being ringbarked.
The twin trunked tree might survive. I have my doubts about the other one.

Oh. I just realized I already covered this in the previous post. I feel better, but still not 100% better I think!