Endangered
White Cockatoo
Cacatua alba
The white cockatoo, also known as the umbrella cockatoo, is a medium-sized all-white cockatoo endemic to tropical rainforest on islands of Indonesia.
Appearance
The white cockatoo is around 46 cm (18 in) long, and weighs about 400 g (14 oz) for small females and up to 800 g (28 oz) for big males. The male white cockatoo usually has a broader head and a bigger beak than the female. When mature some female white cockatoos can have reddish/brown irises, while the irises of the adult male are dark brown or black.
Range and habitat
White Cockatoo is endemic to lowland tropical rainforest on the Moluccan islands of Halmahera, Bacan, Ternate, Tidore, Kasiruta and Mandioli (Bacan group) in North Maluku, Indonesia. It occurs in primary, logged, and secondary forests below 900m. It also occurs in mangroves and plantations among them coconut and agricultural land.
The white cockatoo, also known as the umbrella cockatoo, is a medium-sized all-white cockatoo endemic to tropical rainforest on islands of Indonesia.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
In the wild, white cockatoos feed on berries, seeds, nuts, fruit and roots. In their natural habitat, umbrella cockatoos typically feed on various seeds, nuts and fruits, such as papaya, durian, langsat and rambutan.
As they also feed on corn growing in fields, they do considerable damage and are therefore considered crop pests by farmers. (BirdLife International, 2001) They also eat large insects, such as crickets (order Orthoptera) and small lizards such as skinks. The chicks leave the nest about 84 days after hatching and are independent in 15–18 weeks.
In crisis
The white cockatoo is considered Endangered by the IUCN. Its numbers in the wild have declined owing to capture for the cage bird trade and habitat loss. BirdLife International indicates that catch quotas issued by the Indonesian government were 'exceeded by up to 18 times in some localities' in 1991, with at least 6,600 umbrella cockatoos being taken from the wild by trappers – although fewer birds have been taken from the wild in recent years, both in numerical terms and when taken as a proportion of the entire population.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
White Cockatoo is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on White Cockatoo, Wikidata item Q463135. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
