In the spirit of diversity, we’re eschewing any suggestion of speciesism and celebrating today’s birthday of Cookie, a cockatoo who lived in the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago in the US.
Cookie was born June 30, 1933, and lived for…wait for it…82 years. Cookie was a “Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo,” also known as Leadbeater’s Cockatoo. The birds are native to Australia. Major Mitchell was Major Thomas Mitchell, who described the species in detail in the 1840s. “Leadbeater” was Benjamin Leadbeater, a London naturalist who gave a stuffed specimen to Nicholas Vigors a bit earlier, and assigned it the Latin name Plyctolophus leadbeateri. The people who actually lived in Australia just called it a pick cockatoo.
Cookie was an original resident of the Brookfield Zoo; he arrived from Australia for its opening in 1934. He came from an Australian zoo, which I guess is why they knew his birthday. Although technically speaking, birds don’t really have birthdays, but “hatchdays.”
In any event, Cookie wasn’t on permanent display in the Brookfield Zoo because they noticed it made him a bit grumpy. Another thing that may have made him grumpy is that for years his diet was seeds, until somebody realized that in the wild, cockatoos eat many more kinds of things. So Cookie’s diet was adjusted. Even though he didn’t particularly like being on display, he did show up for an annual birthday (or hatchday) celebration, and there’s now a memorial to him at the zoo. And in 2020, there was even a book published about him: Cookie the Cockatoo: Everything Changes.
