The yellow-tailed black cockatoo's diet primarily includes seeds of native and introduced plants while also feeding on wood-boring grubs.

[5] They nest in large hollows high in old growth native trees (~ greater than 200 years old),[6] generally Eucalyptus regnans.

Although they remain common throughout much of their range, fragmentation of habitat and loss of large trees suitable for nesting has caused population decline in Victoria and South Australia.

[4] In some places yellow-tailed black cockatoos appear to have partially adapted to recent human alteration of landscape and they can often be seen in parts of urban Canberra, Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne.

Like most parrots, it is protected by CITES, an international agreement that makes trade, export, and import of listed wild-caught species illegal.

The three species of Zanda were formerly included in Calyptorhynchus (and still are by some authorities), but are now widely placed in a genus of their own due to a deep genetic divergence between the two groups.

[12] The two genera differ in tail color, head pattern, juvenile food begging calls and the degree of sexual dimorphism.

[14] However, an analysis of protein allozymes published in 1984 revealed the two Western Australian forms to be more closely related to each other than to the yellow-tailed,[15] and the consensus since then has been to treat them as three separate species.

[3] It has a short mobile crest on the top of its head, and the plumage is mostly brownish-black with paler feather-margins in the neck, nape, and wings, and pale yellow bands in the tail feathers.

[19] The elongated bill has a pointed maxilla (upper beak), suited to digging out grubs from tree branches and trunks.

[19] Australian farmer and amateur ornithologist John Courtney proposed that the similarity between juvenile and female eye rings prevented adult males becoming aggressive to younger birds.

[19] The yellow-tailed black cockatoo is distinguished from other dark-plumaged birds by its yellow tail and ear markings, and its contact call.

[23] An all-yellow bird lacking black pigment was recorded in Wauchope, New South Wales, in December 1996, and it remained part of the local group of cockatoos for four years.

[23] The birds prefers native temperate forests, while also being ubiquitous in pine plantations, and occasionally in urban areas, as long as there is a plentiful food supply.

[30] The "Black Saturday bushfires" of 2009 appear to have caused sufficient loss of their natural habitat for them to have been sighted in other parts of the urban areas of Melbourne as well.

[23][31] Outside of the breeding season in autumn or winter they may coalesce into flocks of a hundred birds or more, while family interactions between pairs or trios are maintained.

[35] The male yellow-tailed black cockatoo courts by puffing up his crest and spreading his tail feathers to display his yellow plumage.

[36] A 1994 study of nesting sites in Eucalyptus regnans forest in the Strzelecki Ranges in eastern Victoria found the average age of trees used for hollows by the yellow-tailed black cockatoo to be 228 years.

The authors noted that the proposed 80–150 year rotation time for managed forests would impact on the numbers of suitable trees.

[39] Newly hatched chicks are covered with yellow down and have pink beaks that fade to a greyish white by the time of fledging.

A pair of yellow-tailed black cockatoos at Rotterdam Zoo stopped breeding when they were 41 and 37 years of age, but still showed signs of close bonding.

[43][44] In the Eyre Peninsula, the yellow-tailed black cockatoo has become dependent on the introduced Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis), alongside native species.

If successful, they peel and tear down a strip of bark to make a perch for themselves before continuing to gouge and excavate the larvae, which have deeply tunneled into the heartwood.

With pine trees, they prefer green cones, nipping them off at the stem and holding in one foot, then systematically lifting each segment and extracting the seed.

[43] In 2004, a captive yellow-tailed black cockatoo and two free-living tawny frogmouths (Podargus strigoides) suffering neurological symptoms were shown to be hosting the rat nematode Angiostrongylus cantonensis.

[50] Yellow-tailed black cockatoos can cause damage in pine and Eucalyptus plantations by weakening stems through gouging out pieces of wood to extract moth larvae.

In places with these gum plantations, the population of the larva of the cossid moth Xyleutes boisduvali grows, which then leads to increased predation (and hence tree damage) by cockatoos.

This is due to habitat fragmentation and loss of large trees used for breeding hollows, although birds have become more plentiful in the vicinity of pine plantations.

[53] This species was seldom seen in captivity before the late 1950s, after which time a large number of wild-caught birds entered the Australian market.

In 2000, there were pairs of yellow-tailed black cockatoos in Puerto de la Cruz's Loro Parque zoo in Spain and in Rotterdam.