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Little Corella | Cacatua sanguinea

Naaktoogkaketoe | Cacatúa sanguínea

The Little Corella is the most widespread of the three Australian cockatoos with a bare eye-ring: a pure white, stocky bird with blue-grey spectacles of naked skin and a hint of pink between eye and bill. It moves in flocks that can run into thousands and that turn late afternoon over an inland river town into a deafening spectacle.

Little Corella (Cacatua sanguinea) — Photo: Charles J. Sharp — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Voice

A shrill, three-part screech with a wailing drawn-out note, quee-erk quee-erk, higher and quicker than the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo's. In a flock it becomes a rattling cackle; hundreds lifting off together make a noise that carries for kilometres and that many Australian councils have a complaints procedure for.

No freely licensed recording has been found for this species yet; what to listen for is described below.

Identification

A compact white cockatoo of 35–42 cm and a little over four hundred grams, with a short broad crest that barely clears the head and is usually invisible. The marks are on the face: a wide, bare, blue-grey eye-ring and a faint pinkish-red patch between eye and bill that looks like a bloodstain close up. Upper and lower mandible are of similar length and both short — that is the difference that counts. In flight the underwing and undertail flash sulphur-yellow. The sexes are alike; young birds are slightly smaller but otherwise as the adults.

Confusion species

The two species this guide both calls 'Oostelijke langsnavelkaketoe' are the hard ones. Cacatua tenuirostris has a greatly extended, pale upper mandible like a small chisel and a broad orange-red crescent across the upper breast, as well as red between eye and bill; Cacatua pastinator is clearly larger, also long and pointed in the bill, but has no breast band. Pink Cockatoo (Cacatua leadbeateri) has no bare blue eye-ring but a white-feathered surround to the eye, a pink wash and a red-and-yellow banded crest. Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita) is larger, lacks the pink on the face and has a narrow erect sulphur-yellow crest. With a flock overhead, study the base of the bill, not the crest.

Habitat

Open country with trees and water within reach: river red gum woodland along creeks and rivers, eucalypt savanna, grassland, crops, pasture and grazing land. It drinks daily and so is never far from a dam, a trough or a river. In the south-east it has become a town bird: the parks, sports fields, school grounds and street trees of Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. Nest hollows are in large old eucalypts and are used for years on end.

Where the bird is most often found, arranged by main group and formation.

Range and movements

Almost the whole of Australia, in a broad arc from eastern South Australia through Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and the Northern Territory round to the coastal plains of Western Australia, with wide gaps between some of the populations. It is absent from most closed forest and was originally absent from the south-eastern coastal belt, where it established itself during the twentieth century as a town bird and from escaped cage birds; the same holds for Tasmania. Beyond the map window the range continues into southern New Guinea.

Resident
dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

The map is a density field, not a drawn range boundary: it is built from the records themselves and therefore does not follow state borders. The seasonal colour comes from the arrangement per state, the depth of colour from the records of GBIF (2006-2026), counted per 0,7° cell and divided by all bird records in that same cell, so that the density of birdwatchers does not count. Country outlines: Natural Earth (public domain).

Where and when to look

Go to the river of an inland town late in the afternoon — Bourke, Wilcannia, Katherine, Mildura — and wait by the red gums for the flock to come in to drink and roost. To separate it from the corellas with long bills, put the scope on a single perched bird: mandibles of equal length and a clean white breast means Little Corella.

Conservation

Not threatened (LC), and of all the cockatoos in this area it is doing best. Grain growing, stock raising and above all the provision of watering points across the dry interior have enlarged both its range and its numbers; in parts of New South Wales and Queensland it counts as a crop pest and is controlled under permit. In places the problem is chiefly nuisance, as flocks chew bark, cables, aerials and roofing to pieces. The one real conservation concern lies in the south-west, where its urban flocks hybridise with, and take nest hollows from, its scarcer relatives.

Scientific name

Cacatua sanguinea | Gould, 1843

John Gould described the species in 1843 as Cacatua sanguinea; because it still stands in that genus, author and year carry no parentheses. The epithet is Latin for 'blood-red' and refers not to the plumage but to the small red patch between eye and bill. The type locality is the north coast of Australia, narrowed to Port Essington in the Northern Territory. The Dutch guide name points to the broad area of bare skin around the eye. The English word corella is taken from an Aboriginal language of inland New South Wales.