Our guest: Chris Tzaros with an endangered swift parrot. Picture: Michael CoppNATURE lovers are full of hope for a rare bird as nationally endangered swift parrots are increasingly sighted in Hobsons Bay.
Altona North’s Chris Tzaros, BirdLife Australia’s swift parrot recovery co-ordinator, says logging and other habitat clearance are partly to blame for the parrot’s decline. Only about 2000 are left in the world.
“They only breed in eastern Tasmania and there’s direct conflict between forestry and parrot-breeding opportunities,” Mr Tzaros said.
“Also, in the face of climate change . . . that’s going to have an impact on the eucalypt flowering, which this bird needs.”
Mr Tzaros says the world’s fastest parrot is also in decline because of its tendency to collide with objects while flying at 100km/h.
“People might think, why the hell does it fly into windows and fences?
“The swift parrot has evolved in a place where there’s never been windows and fences and in the past couple of hundred years, bang, they’ve popped up.
An endangered swift parrot.
“A few years ago, I found one outside the Mason Street swimming pool in Altona. A pair had flown in to one of those glass bus shelters.”
He said tree planting by Friends of Lower Kororoit Creek would provide habitat for the threatened species in the longer term.
Friends president Geoff Mitchelmore said he had been planting trees for 13 years in a bid to attract the world’s longest-migratory parrot. ‘‘Our goal as a friends group is to bring that parrot back,” he said.
Report swift parrot sightings – including dead or injured birds – by emailing mail@birdlife.org.au