Logging blamed for decline in already rare swift parrot

Endangered: The swift parrot. ONE of Australia's rarest and fastest birds, the swift parrot, seems to be plummeting in number, and logging has been blamed.

Sightings of the flashy red and green parrot have declined sharply in its winter home of flowering eucalypt woodlands in Victoria and NSW, surveys show.

Checks by 400 volunteers, conducted under a federal-state recovery plan for the bird, found that instead of improving, the number of sightings declined from 2.5 per survey in 2000 to 0.5 last year.

Already listed as endangered, with fewer than 1000 breeding pairs in 2003, the swift parrot might be close to critically endangered, said Chris Tzaros, conservation manager of the non-government organisation Birds Australia.

Mr Tzaros said the bird was probably susceptible to a drying mainland climate.

But Birds Australia has backed a new report, The Swift Parrot in Tasmania, that investigates how the logging of the bird's only breeding ground in the island's south-east is endangering it. Flying in 100km/h bursts, the swift parrot probably uses its extraordinary speed to escape predators.

The report, by forests campaigner Margaret Blakers and botanist Isobel Crawford, found the swift parrot's limited foraging and nesting habitat was being logged at a rate of 1000 hectares a year, with nests almost certainly destroyed by logging.

Already, the discovery of a swift parrot flock this year has led to the suspension of logging in the contentious Wielangta forest, east of Hobart. Senator Bob Brown failed in the High Court to have logging in the Wielangta ended because of its impact on endangered species.

Forestry Tasmania said swift parrots had about 391,000 hectares of potential habitat in the state. "On the basis that a theoretical minimum of 1000 hectares of forest is required for breeding, it appears that there is far more forest potentially available for breeding than there are birds," the agency said.

Tasmanian Resources Minister David Llewellyn said a "strategic species" plan was being prepared to manage the bird's habitat.