Give them a quick squirt with a water pistol, spray bottle, or garden hose.If cockies are damaging your house, garden or other property, the following strategies may be helpful: Sutherland Shire has a wide variety of natural food sources for cockies, so they won’t be missing out if you don’t feed them.

They are likely to turn up regularly in noisy and often destructive flocks.

If using a public park or open space, always put your rubbish in the bin or take it home and dispose of it appropriately.

Cockies and ibis both thrive on access to food scraps.

Don’t overfill your garbage bins and make sure the lid is closed.

Cockatoos are fond of chewing and pulling materials apart, such as the soft timbers around window frames, decking wood, outdoor furniture, trees, shrubs etc.

They have a harsh, screeching call which can be very loud, especially when the flock is large.

Some of these sources are not particularly healthy for the birds.

Rubbish bins, food scraps, waste processing centres, open grassy ovals, people intentionally feeding birds, gardens planted with seed and fruit-bearing plants all provide ample food for these opportunistic birds.

Some birds have even learnt to open bin lids to access garbage. Cockatoos will happily scavenge for food in garbage bins which can cause significant mess. However, the following cockatoo behaviours can be challenging: Having cockatoos in our cities and suburbs is quite wonderful.

Sulphur-crested Cockatoos (also known as ‘cockatoos’ or just ‘cockies’) are successfully adapting to urban environments as their natural habitat reduces.

Males and females look very similar, although females have red eyes while males’ eyes are black. Sulphur-crested Cockatoos are large white native parrots with a yellow crest.

Silver crested cockatoo