COCKY WHISPERING AT COOMALLO CREEK

This patch of remnant bush on the edge of the West Australian wheatbelt is a place loved by one of Australia's rarest bird species and the man who has studied the site for more than 50 years.

- VICTORIA LAURIE

THERE’S A STORY in every hollow of the grey-white trunks of wandoo woodland at Coomallo Creek, 220km north of Perth in Western Australia. The handsome eucalypts stand like leafy islands in a sea of floral heath. From the 1950s, farmers cut a swathe through the native bush to tame and clear it for agriculture. By 1969 land was released for farming around Coomallo Creek and clearing had begun. That was the year “Cocky Whisperer” Dr Denis Saunders AM first visited Coomallo Creek. Exploring ridge tops and breakaways where the wandoo grows, Denis was transfixed by the open woodland’s beauty and age. He realised the knotted trunks were so old they’d been standing long before Captain Cook arrived in Tahiti to monitor the Sun’s eclipse in 1769.

Tree age was important in Denis’s quest to study Carnaby’s black-cockatoos (Calyptorhynchus latirostris), the handsome white-tailed black parrots that habitually nest and fledge their young at Coomallo Creek. “They’re wonderful to look at and very placid, and they’re graceful in flight,” Denis says. “We’ve got a history of all the birds that have bred here and that come back to nest in hollows within 60m of where they fledged.” The birds’ preferred hollows have taken 120 years or more to form – knock down any tree, and you have to wait a century before nature etches out a metre-deep hollow in its trunk or branch.

Four generations of the Raffan farming family have owned Coomallo Creek, and three have lived there. On their 2000ha property, they’ve left intact a north–south tree corridor that extends about 1km wide by 9km long across three other properties. “It [the tree corridor] was due to a lot of foresight by my father and grandfather,” James Raffan says, the family’s third-generation farmer. “They didn’t clear all the land and they left many trees as shade for stock. We’re fortunate, and the birds keep coming back, generation after generation.”