31/08/2026
Cockatoos: Cockatoos in Field and Aviary by Tony Silva (Book, English, 2026)
516 pages, 716 photographs, and forty-three years of keeping, breeding and watching cockatoos. The third title in Tony Silva’s in Field and Aviary series, after Macaws and Amazon Parrots
Tony Silva first handled a cockatoo in 1976, in a pet store. By the early 1980s he was breeding them and was not satisfied that the birds were truly content, so he saved his money and spent a summer watching them in the field in Australia. In 1982 he decided that one day he would write a book about this group. This is that book, finished forty-three years later.
In that time he has kept or cared for every species of cockatoo and has bred all of them but three. Where his own experience ends, the book draws on other keepers and field observers, named and dated, so that the reader gets more than one man’s opinion.
What is in it
Species accounts. Each one opens with a distribution map showing every subspecies in its own colour and a panel of the numbers that matter: length, weight, egg size, clutch size, incubation period and CITES listing. Then synonyms, scientific name, type locality, etymology and diagnostic features, with the sources given.
Breeding, documented. Recorded breedings by country and by breeder, with years and numbers of young, so you can see who has done what and where.
Hand-rearing. A chapter on the practice, and within the species accounts, feeding schedules by the hour and tables of chick weights day by day from hatching to weaning, with what changed at each stage.
Housing. Aviary types and dimensions, suspended enclosures, nest log sizes and hanging angles, substrates, and how to arrange aviaries in a row without the neighbours causing trouble.
Diet. Pellets against fresh food, calcium, which vegetables and greens, which nuts suit which species and which do not, and when in the day to feed what.
Mutations, with how each one is inherited and where it came from.
Legband sizes, species by species.
The Cockatiel has its own account, as it should.
The photographs come from real aviaries and real nests, taken by the breeders themselves, and each one is credited. There are 716 of them, along with several dozen distribution maps and drawings
