Saw a Rakali for the first time tonight. It scurried across the road at about 12:30am as I was on my way home from work. I've never seen one before and was super excited about the fact that it could be one. It was a very large rodent with a long head, small ears, and a distinct white tail tip. Looking at mammals in my area I really can't mistake it for anything else. I'm so bummed I couldn't pull over and get a picture but was very cool to see one. On both sides of the road is wetlands so I'd say it was travelling from one side to the other. Looked to be a healthy, active adult. Would love to see it again one night.
I've been working through all of the sulphur-crested cockatoo observations on iNaturalist trying to find affected birds to add to the project. In the first comb through I only took birds that had obvious feather loss or beak deformities from a quick glance. In my second comb though now I'm checking images more closely and opening those where the whole bird isn't visible in the preview in a separate tab to check them. Have been able to add a surprising number missed from the first time. I'm only so far as 2022 going back through but it seems there's a promising number to add. I plan to do a third go around where I look very closely at observations where the bird is far away or where there is a large group. Hopefully by then I can say I've found all of the existing observations in the sulphur-crested cockatoos and focus on new observations from then on.
An obvious restriction to the quality of this collection is that we can really only guess if a bird is suffering from PBFD specifically and doesn't have something else going on. Some cockatoos I've added have very poor feather quality and are potentially experiencing early symptoms or they may have a poor diet, lost fethers in a run-in with a predator etc. Most seem to follow the same pattern of losing feathers around their eyes and face first so I've tried to keep that in mind when deciding if a particular bird seems to be following that pattern or not and should be included.
I'd like to look at other species when I'm done with sulphur-crested cockatoos because I've heard rainbow lorikeets are perhaps the next most frequent carriers and other parrots have also been known to get it. Could be harder than the cockatoos as it presents differently in other species and I'm not sure it will be as recognisable but I'll see how it pans out when I get there.
I greatly appreciate everyone who has already uploaded observations of cockatoos and hope people can begin adding new observations to grow this project further.
