A bright white sulphur-crested cockatoo that may have escaped its cage has found a new family in Carlsbad: a large flock of crows.

 Residents in a central Carlsbad neighborhood off Tamarack Avenue have spotted the striking exotic bird amid a sea of jet-black crows that stops in the area during daily flights between the coast and some inland overnight roost.

“I thought my eyes were getting worse than they already had,” said Craig Correll, who said he saw the strange traveling companions last week. “There was this white bird in the middle of a bunch of crows.”

Correll snapped a photo of the cockatoo perched near four or five indifferent crows on a rooftop near his home. He also found a YouTube video posted in November in which an observer expresses surprise at seeing a cockatoo foraging among crows on a sidewalk a few blocks away from Correll’s house.

Crows are members of the corvid family, which includes ravens, jays, magpies and others. A flock of crows is sometimes called a “murder.”

San Diego Natural History Museum bird expert Phil Unitt said it’s not surprising that a cockatoo on the lam would take up with crows.


Native to Australia and New Guinea, “the sulphur-crested cockatoo is a very gregarious species,” Unitt said. “If it escaped from its cage here, it’s not going to find any other cockatoos.