Animal Diaries Archive

Territorial Behaviour

30 September 2005

Isn't it starting to warm up? The daily temperatures here at the Zoo have been getting up around 26 and 28°C. It has been such a fast change between winter and spring that it has almost caught the birds by surprise; the majority of them are having to get used to flying in the heat very quickly.

I can tell you that we are not looking forward to summer this year. With the heat, the birds around the park start to breed, and when they do they become very territorial over their chosen nesting sites and will display territorial behaviour towards our birds when they are out flying. This behaviour mostly comes in the form of chasing and screaming at them. As you can imagine, this makes the birds a little nervous and slightly drags their attention away from what they should be doing.

You can see in this week's photo Roma, one of our lovely Major Mitchell Cockatoos, is high in the sky keeping an eye out while flying past the lightening rod on top of the foodcourt, just to make sure that it is working effectively. It is only the start of the breeding season, so our feathered ones are going to have to adjust to these extra distractions. Fortunately for us, the Major Mitchells have taken the Crocoseum on as their territory and have so far been successful at removing magpies and swallows from the arena. Keep up the good work, fellas.