From the brink of extinction: successful recovery of the glossy black-cockatoo on kangaroo Island

The last remaining population of the South Australian subspecies of glossy black-cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus lathami halmaturinus, Fig. 9.1) has been confined to 4400km² Kangaroo Island for ~40 years. The diet of this subspecies of glossy black-cockatoo is one of the most spacialised among birds, comprising almost exclusively of the seeds contained within the hard, particularly large, cones of drooping she-oak (Allocasuarina verticillata). The bill of this subspecies is corrspondingly larger than that of the eastern Australian subspecies, which feeds on smaller coned casuarine species (Schodde et al. 1993). As recently as 4000 years ago, Allocasuarina forests covered vast areas of south-eastern Australia (Bickford and Gell 2005) and the distribution of the cockatoos may have stretched from the hinterland from Eyre Peninsula in South Australia through to western Victoria (Schodde et al. 1993).