Australia - WA - Albany to Dunsborough - Scrutinizing White Tails!

The journey from Albany to Dunsborough was not without incident as a young Kangaroo obviously got spooked by the only car on the road and decided to bong across the road in front of me. I am not sure how I didn’t hit the marsupial but I remembered my training on the skid pan and how to stop a vehicle in half the distance required! Whew that would have caused considerable damage if the worst had happened! The Kangaroo would have been fine!!

I also happened on a group of Emu which were grazing in a large field. Most land is fenced in Australia to prevent the above happening too often but I have seen a few roadside casualties and plenty of rubber on the roads!

In open and wooded areas I lay off the gas pedal to have a listen for calling birds in particular Cockatoos who can generally be heard from a mile away. I spied a pair of white tails calling from a tree set back from the road. The call sounded different to the Carnaby’s I had heard before so I parked up and set about the task of photographing both birds with particular focus on the bills.

Carnaby’s and Baudin’s Cockatoos are very similar one of the structural differences is in the shape of the bill. Carnaby’s has a smaller thicker bill where the upper mandible meets the lower without overlapping. The Baudin’s upper mandible is longer and pointed overlapping the lower. 

The photos were not the best with distance and heat haze playing a bit part in the final result. The above picture is of the male which has a red eye and was smaller than the female. 

(Carnaby's Dryandra Woodland)

Having looked closely at the photos and pictures I have taken of Carnaby's I believe the birds were Baudin’s based on the bill structure. The call there are aspects of both species in the sequence and I could not decide either way.

Having spoken to local birders Baudin’s are more prevalent in that area. However you cannot rule out the possibility of both being present hence the scrutiny of photographs.

These are tricky to separate feeding preferences used to define both species distribution and once both were considered a single species until recent times!