Beyond Nests and Forage Trees: The Hidden Infrastructure that Keeps Black Cockatoos Alive
Beyond Nests and Forage Trees: The Hidden Infrastructure that Keeps Black Cockatoos Alive
This afternoon I stood beneath a cockatoo "drinking tree”...a tree with a hollow that holds rainwater. One by one, birds flew in, leaning into the bowl to drink, then moving on for the next bird to fly in. No seeds here, no nesting hollow...just water, at height, in a place that feels safe.
It’s easy to measure value when it’s obvious: a nest hollow or a marri tree dripping with fruit. But black cockatoos live by a network, not a single point. In the field you see it..trees used as staging posts, lookout towers, social hubs, roosts, and cautious stepping-stones on the approach to a nest hollow. None of these trees look particularly special in a spreadsheet. Together, they’re the infrastructure of survival.
What the “unremarkable” trees are doing
1) Drinking trees (canopy hollows / canopy pools)
After rain, some canopy hollows hold water (known as phytotelmata). These micro-waterpoints matter. Elevated water can be safer than ground puddles, less exposure to predators, cars or disturbance. Birds can drop in, drink, and move on quickly.
2) Stags and tall sentinels
Dead standing trees (stags) and the tallest live trees are often used as sentinel perches. Cockatoos land there to scan, call, preen, regroup, and only then move to a nearby nest or feeding site. During breeding, adults frequently use a nearby stag or bare limb as a staging post before the last short flight down to the nest hollow. That behaviour reduces risk and gives them time to read the landscape.
3) Approach branches
You’ll often see birds sidling along an exposed branch near the nest rather than flying straight to the lip. Those “nothing special” branches are functional, allowing a cautious approach...a pause to look and listen.
4) Roost trees and social hubs
Flocks use particular trees to roost or to assemble before moving down to drink. These are often tall, open-crowned trees that provide airflow, lines of sight, and quick take-off paths. They’re where information spreads: calls to distant birds, contact calls to partners, the social fabric of a species that lives by flock dynamics.
In ecological language, these are keystone structures...discrete elements that disproportionately support many species or many behaviours. Add them up across a territory and you get structural complexity and functional connectivity: safe ways to move, rest, drink, and breed in a landscape that’s constantly changing.
Why this gets missed
Much of our planning, regulation, and restoration work still treats habitat as a neat little list: nest trees here, feed trees there. If a tree doesn’t tick an obvious box, it can be seen as expendable...removed as a hazard, tidied during thinning, or lost in road and fence line clean-ups.
But animals do not use landscapes as lists. Black cockatoos are central-place foragers during breeding: they return to a nest repeatedly while foraging outward from it. Success depends on the surrounding network...safe staging posts, thermal refuge on hot days, accessible and safe water, roost and perch options with good visibility, escape routes, and approach branches.
Small functions, compounded value
Each element, one branch, one stag, one canopy pool, might only provide a few minutes of value in a day. Compound that across a season and a territory and you get a measurable difference in energy budgets, predation risk, thermal stress, and breeding success. That’s ecological memory in living form: legacy trees and deadwood that continue to pay out benefits long after they stop producing leaves or fruit.
The bigger principle
This isn’t just about cockatoos. The same pattern shows up across ecosystems: small, overlooked structures carry big loads...fallen logs that nurse seedlings, a seep that keeps invertebrates going through a dry spell. When we start seeing past the obvious, management becomes less about heroic single features and more about stewarding the whole fabric that lets life move, rest, feed, breed, and survive.
Today it was a drinking tree. Tomorrow it might be an “ugly” stag that a pair trusts as a lookout, or a tired limb that’s perfect for that slow, careful walk to the nest. If we can learn to value these quiet functions, we give black cockatoos what they actually use: not just habitat patches, but a working landscape.