Think of the Australian Sulfur-Crested Cockatoo as the exotic cousin of the barnyard chicken. By simply recalling the crude expression “a cock and two balls,” you can quite easily remember the cockatoo’s name. However, this bird is anything but crude when it flashes a feathery headdress that looks like a bright yellow sea anemone suckling its crown. At those moments, it is a very beautiful chicken with a fringe and big shoes. But instead of clucking when flying over the canopy, it screeches—sounding kind of like the inverted cry of a constipated human baby. If you’re lucky enough to have a flock of cockatoos land near your feet, they might tilt their heads to show hooked gray beaks that seem designed for snipping barbed wire, or ripping off a finger at the knuckle. With heads still aslant, they’ll implore you with black, white-rimmed eyes for more birdseed. When having a feed, the cockatoos maneuver their large gray claws like human hands, particularly like hands inflicted with Dupuytren’s contracture and filled with fistfuls of food. If you tread too closely to the cockatoos without any seeds, they will ruffle their neck and breast feathers in a warning. However, when they open widely their wings of lemony yellow feathers that remind you of delicious popsicles, you know they want to embrace you. You know this also when they follow you around the backyard. Or crouch next to you on the lawn. Or steal your chair. However, if you pop off a beer cap in a cockatoo’s presence, it will most likely fly off to a nearby branch where it will then ignore you, for it doesn’t appreciate sudden movements. But no worries, mate; the cockatoo does not hold a grudge. It will return tomorrow with eight to twelve of its friends, guaranteed.