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Jun 09, 2023

Photographer surprised by cheeky corellas living inside traffic lights

Look around your city and you’ll find birds hiding in unusual places. Melbourne’s famous peregrine falcons are watched by thousands each year as they raise chicks on the ledge of a Collins Street

Look around your city and you’ll find birds hiding in unusual places.

Melbourne’s famous peregrine falcons are watched by thousands each year as they raise chicks on the ledge of a Collins Street building. They’re not the only birds to find unusual places to live — in NSW you’ll find kookaburras increasingly nesting in termite mounds because we’ve cut down all the hollow-bearing trees they need to raise their young.

Now a pair of little corellas have got the internet talking after they were photographed appearing to nest in a set of traffic lights in a Sydney suburb.

Bird lover Simon Crabtree-Hayes took the photos in Manly on Tuesday and posted them on social media, asking whether the birds would be likely to nest on the red and orange lights where they’d been sitting. Responses to his question were mixed, with one respondent suggesting they have nowhere else to nest.

Speaking to Yahoo News Australia, he described the corellas as looking “quite comfortable” as if they’d been there for “some time”.

“The traffic lights were changing as they normally do and the birds were just doing their thing,” he said.

Growing up in Sydney, he didn’t often see little corellas around the city, but after recent droughts, he’s observed them in coastal towns like Manly.

Similarly, the white ibis that now grace Sydney’s parks were not frequently seen in the 1970s, and did not appear well-established until the 1980s. Brush turkeys were more-or-less wiped out of Sydney early last century but have made a comeback in recent years, travelling from the northern suburbs to inner city areas like Redfern.

Another photo taken by Simon on Thursday shows an osprey nest on top of sports ground lighting poles at Sanctuary Point.

A separate pair is known to raise their young on a lighting pole at Central Coast Stadium in Gosford, while others have been spotted on top of a shopping centre tower in southeast Queensland.

While it may seem remarkable that common native birds can carve out an existence in Aussie cities, endangered species also find refuge amongst our houses, roads and fences too.

Peta Bulling from Australian Conservation Foundation said it’s “truly incredible” that rare species are able to adapt so well to urban areas.

“A great example of that is that is the gang-gang cockatoo. It’s endangered… but you wouldn’t necessarily realise if you were walking around the suburbs of Canberra because you see them relatively often and have a distinct call,” she said.

“But these cockatoos really like the same sort of habitat we do. They like mature trees, and they're not disturbed by humans as much as some other animals.”

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Peta explained there are many species that also like to inhabit the same areas that humans do. “They tend to be the low-lying, flat, coastal areas,” she said. “So we come in close contact with them regularly.

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