(Zanda latirostris) are deep into their winter run — daily sightings across the past week, with 58 records since May marking a sustained influx. These endangered parrots breed inland across the wheatbelt, then push west each winter to forage in coastal banksia scrub, a migration shaped by the shifting availability of nectar and seed.
This narrow strip of heathland sandwiched between ocean and suburbs has become one of their most critical refuges. The birds depend on the flowering cycles of native shrubs here, particularly banksias, which produce the energy-dense resources they need to survive the cold months. As coastal development fragments what remains of their winter range, the persistence of this foraging area and the health of its flowering plants grow more essential to the species' survival each year.
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The ghost fungus grows on dead wood in this bushland, and in the long summer evenings it is faintly visible after dark, a pale luminescence on the bark of old logs. The quenda passes these without interest. It is looking for something that moves, or something that smells like it recently did. The sky above the canopy is still blue at the horizon. The air smells of warm eucalyptus resin and dry sand. Somewhere in the understorey, a small animal is pushing its nose into the ground.
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, cavities that take upward of a century of tree growth to form and cannot be replaced on any human timescale once cleared. Feeding depends just as narrowly on stands of banksia and hakea, the shrubs whose cones this woodland still holds enough of to draw flocks in through the winter months, when many of the region's cockatoos are shuttling between separate breeding and feeding grounds. Decades of land clearing across the southwest have steadily narrowed both resources at once, and iNaturalist records this species as threatened, part of why its sightings here carry extra weight.
The sightings record here can't say whether the local population is growing or shrinking; community observations track where people happen to be looking as much as where the birds are. What it does establish is continued occupancy through a season when this species is often on the move elsewhere, which makes this stretch of woodland, with its old hollows and its banksia and hakea thickets, worth watching rather than just passing through. A flock working the canopy this week, cracking cones with that heavy bill, is a small, ordinary-looking event that is actually one of the more precarious things happening in the bush right now.
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