I got the shock of my life when Rosetta arrived!
My previous cockatoo (a galah called Dominic) was a quiet, damaged personality who had barely any requirements beyond food and water. No matter how hard I tried, I could barely get him to interact, let alone play. Then, he died in his thirty-sixth year.
Enter Rosetta.
She arrived at the perfect (!) time for a cockatoo to enter a new situation. She was just on the point of entering her puberty and was as nesty and hormonal as all get-out (she still is). She *would not* be still, even for a moment. She was ON the GO all the time, running, flying, screaming, climbing and BITING. She was a mess! I couldn't get much sense out of the former owners (I strongly suspect they were telling me fibbers about why they needed to rehome 'Setta), so all I could do was to work with what I could see: a hormonal female that had clearly never had any boundaries set and had no clue how to interact appropriately. It was *very difficult* to handle her at first.
Now, I'm not telling you this horror story to put you off. I guess I'm telling you so that you can be mindful that a baby bird WILL change when it reaches puberty and a SC2 is a lot of bird. They are heavy and strong and the beak and claws can do significant damage. I posted photos of my arms, scratched and bleeding from having Rosetta simply landing and taking off from them. Getting a cockatoo is exactly like adopting a two-year-old that will stay two forever. You will have to be there for it every single day (no holidays) and you will have to be indefatigable in providing it with food and play and everything else. If you don't, then Problems will arise.
Cockatoos need more than just a few sticks and a boing. They need serious wood to chew on every day. They need foraging toys, both home-made and commercially bought. They need opportunities to work off steam (flying is themost efficient) and to spend time being actively taught by you (if you don't, you'll wind up with a whirlwind like Rosetta).
When a cockatoo *doesn't* get what it needs, the day usually arrives when the family decides 'someone else will have more to give than we do' and rehomes it. The bird is suddenly boxed up willy-nilly and shipped off to a strange place, often with loud kids or other animals where it has to learn all over again how to be social with a different set of humans. Some birds suffer this several times in their lifetimes and it's awful for them, often leading to personality disorders where they become more and more difficult to rehome.
This is why we like to 'tell it like it is' when a person mentions he'd like a cocky. It's so much better for everyone if you know the huge commitment you'll be making *before* acquiring a cocky than if you wait until you're dead tired of the massive workload and can't do it any more. If I'd known what Rosetta would be like, I think I might have thought again before buying her. There are some days when it's extremely disheartening and I feel I simply can't get through.
HOWEVER...
there are other days when she is sweet and charming and listens to everything I say to her. There are days when she trampolines on her pizza box (she loves doing that) and bounces on her boing and hangs upside-down from her swing and does all the hilarious things that make her my darling. There are some days when she doesn't scream for hours but spends her time chewing busily on the branches I provide and cracking the gumnuts open to get out the seeds and little gnatty things inside.
I have to say that overall Rosetta has improved massively since she arrived, mainly because it hit me early on to start training her to do little tricks. That concentration was all she needed to make her stop and think instead of going ape****. Without writing an essay about Rosetta, I'll just say that it has taken a LOT of concentrated hard work to help her get where she is and it'll take a lot more before I can just open the cage and let out for a few hours (not possible yet).
That's what you could be faced with in acquiring a cockatoo. 'Setta is a Little Corella. She only weighs about five hundred grams. A SC2 weighs nearly twice that much ('bout 800g) and needs a lot more space to spead its wings. TBH, I wonder whether corellas might actually be more needy than sulphur cresteds. They certainly play and need to play a lot more. I've never seen a SC2 doing the mad things corellas do...
Anyway. Sorry to rave on and on. Just sharing my experiences for your perusal. Let us know what you decide to do!
