‘Flamin’ cockatoos’ have lost much of their habitat to bushfires. Can the species survive?

Pink cockatoos feed on Aleppo pine, ripping into the cones with dexterous claws and beaks, outside the Wyperfeld national park entrance. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Pink cockatoos feed on Aleppo pine, ripping into the cones with dexterous claws and beaks, outside the Wyperfeld national park entrance. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian ‘Flamin’ cockatoos’ have lost much of their habitat to bushfires. Can the species survive? Two fires in 12 years wiped out all but a handful of the mature native pines in Victoria’s Wyperfeld national park, a key breeding ground for endangered pink cockatoos Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast At the entrance to Wyperfeld national park, in north-west Victoria , more than a dozen pink cockatoos are sprinkled across a hedge row of pine trees like Christmas decorations. These are Aleppo pines, not the native conifers that the birds rely on for nesting habitat and as a primary source of food. Still, the feathered ornaments appear quite content, nestled in among the spruce and ripping into pine cones with their dexterous claws and beaks, making gentle cracking sounds that punctuate the soft roar of Mallee winds. It’s a blissful scene that belies the devastation ahead. Inside the park, 70% of the cockatoo’s core habitat, an area known as “pine plains”, was scorched in January’s devastating bushfires, leaving charcoal shadows and empty space. That’s bad news for Lophochroa leadbeateri , an endangered bird previously known as the Major Mitchell’s cockatoo . The ecologist Dr Victor Hurley calls them “flame-crested”, or sometimes simply “flamin’ cockatoos”, referencing their fiery red and yellow striped crest, and the blaze of salmon pink under their wings. View image in fullscreen Two fires in 12 years is devastating for the cockatoos at Wyperfeld, ecologist Victor Hurley says. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian Hurley, who has spent decades monitoring the birds, says the species relies on slender cypress pines, a native tree called Callitris gracilis , for their breeding hollows. But to accommodate a growing cockatoo family, the trees must be ancient, he says – at least 85 years old, and ideally 125 years or more. Very large, old pines were already vanishingly rare, thanks to a legacy of land clearing and major fires in 2014, which tore through 60% of pine plains, destroying 97% of the known cavity-bearing trees in the burnt area. That was before the 2025-26 bushfires, which torched 440,000 hectares of land across Victoria – larger than the area which burned on Black Saturday, according to the state government . Of that, 59,000 hectares was in Wyperfeld park. View image in fullscreen Burnt cypress pines glow red in the late afternoon sun. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian The fires took their toll on many endangered birds. Eastern bristlebirds lost 82% of their habitat at Howe Flat near Mallacoota, a key stronghold for the species. Post-fire surveys of the su