Much of the valuable closed canopy forests of the southern and eastern areas of Tasmania, continuously harvested virtually from European first settlement, have this century been barred to industry because they are the seasonal habitat of the critically endangered swift parrot.
This action needs to be carefully examined in the present context of the universal recognition that carbon storage in carefully harvested forest has a vital role in reducing the impact of climate change, and barring native forest from wise management means that plantation timber is perceived to be the major player.
The problem here is that plantations require significant rainfall and depth of soil such that they vie for land suitable for agriculture, and the immediate plantation returns from carbon credits, and the long term returns from timber sales, simply do not match the more substantial and currently increasing yearly profits from farming. Thus, the notion that plantations will meet the carbon abatement target and the future commercial need for timber is naïve.
What is vital in my view as a land owner is that Private Forests Tasmania, and the Forest Practices Authority (both having the stated roles of policy advisors to the government) carefully re-appraise the current swift parrot policy and review their advice, firstly with regard to forest management practices to better respond to the immediate timber needs of the Australia (where much of our timber is imported from countries with environmentally dubious practices), and, secondly, the need to fight against the problem of global warming by adopting selective logging, which, if accepted universally, I hope to now show will enhance the plight of the swift parrot.
The need is urgent because current policy is failing. Since forest closure, the numbers of swift parrots in the wild have declined to critically low levels.
Conservationists have dictated current policy and for a number of reasons I strongly believe that under that guidance the species will become extinct.
The primary reason they give is that the forest industry has destroyed the environment in the past and continues to do so. It is not timber harvesting that is the problem. The conversion of forest to agriculture has been a problem, and yet, despite the prohibition upon clearing blue gum forests in the state began this century, swift parrot numbers have plummeted to critically low levels.
Conservationists rationalise this by attributing the recent decline to the ravages of the ‘recently introduced’ sugar glider. There are two problems here. The first is that the notion of the sugar glider as an exotic species has not been properly based. It is possible that swift parrots have been contending with gliders for centuries.
Secondly, the swift parrot has a companion species, the musk lorikeet, which not only favours the pollen and flowers of the blue gums and black gums that the swift parrot’s favour, but also nests in holes of senescent trees, as do the swift parrots. That being the case, the lorikeets should be suffering a similar decline. As a landowner on the east coast, I can vouch for the fact that that species is flourishing.
Another stated reason for the decline is the presence of windows on rural structures. In the forty years of my living on a farm adjoining the Wielangta forests on the east coast, two birds struck our windows. One was a lorikeet which broke its neck. The other was a swift parrot which, due to the magical restorative powers of my hands, recovered from its prone position, and managed to fly off, albeit rather shakily. The notion that the windows are a threat is frankly absurd, and the proposal that the species’ survival will be assisted by building structures with slanting windows is shameful in my view.
The problem with the current policy of harvesting prohibition is that it emanates only from conservationists’ viewpoints, with the purpose of exploiting the near extinction of the species for the purpose of banning forestry rather than protecting a species. Thus, when the species’ decline is attributed to the birds’ migrating each summer to avail themselves of the blue-gum and black-gum flowers prevalent along the East Coast of Tasmania, and that logging has decimated those feeding areas, thus causing the near fatal decline in the parrot population, we should examine this view objectively and rationally.
It fails firstly because blue-gums and black gums proliferate in the mainland areas from which the birds flee in summer. They do not migrate to feed but to breed, and the reason for the decline is obvious to most who are familiar with those coastal forest areas. Like the recently announced examples of tropical bird species in Queensland with numbers declining rapidly because they seek a cooler altitudinal environment to breed, and global warming has driven them to seek greater heights than the mountains offer, the swift parrots have sought a latitudinal alternative to provide cooler breeding locations and now experience a situation where the temperature of the breeding grounds in Tasmania now matches that from which they escaped in the past.
The decline in numbers of the orange bellied parrot which, like the swift parrot, migrates from the mainland to the west coast of Tasmania to breed, just as the swift parrot migrates to cooler climes on the east coast, is more than the coincidence that the conservationists would have us believe. Climate change is the reason for both parrots’ demise. This is not acknowledged by conservationists because the plight of the orange bellied parrots cannot be attached to the destruction of its habitat by logging.
Breeders of swift parrots, who now possibly care for more birds in captivity than exist in the wild, provide valuable insight with regard to the needs of swift parrots which I would hope conservationists could well acknowledge. Firstly, most successful breeders feed a commercial pelletised diet, a wet food lorikeet mix, small parrot seed mix plus a liberal supply of seasonal fruit. The birds thrive despite the absence of blue gums and black gums in their diet. Secondly, breeders stress the need for careful control during breeding to prevent loss of chicks from being overheated, recommending ventilation through wet hessian to reduce nesting temperatures.
What, therefore, can be done to enable the species to survive?
In the short term, the role of breeders should be acknowledged and rewarded. Like the breeders of orange bellied parrots who are endeavouring to increase bird numbers by supervised breeding (although their efforts are not served well by releasing birds back into the wild at this stage), those breeding swift parrots should be encouraged and rewarded, not dismissed as irrelevant by those now professing to be experts.
In the long term, as for so many other threatened species of wild life throughout the world, man- induced global climatic change must be brought under control. One vital component of that is the carbon retentive role that forest can play. That can be either with the establishment of plantations on what was agricultural land, or by the carefully managed harvesting of native forests where both timber and slash are used in products that lock in carbon. Forests on private land which are currently not permitted to be touched are not serving the interests of landowners or swift parrots. Those forests, dominated by mature and senescent trees, are neutral with regard to carbon storage and do not contribute to the fight against global warming despite the claims of conservationists.
Even blue gum forests can be included in this harvest program, because swift parrots are not fearful of human activity. For one hundred and fifty years the forests of Wielangta have been harvested until very recently. One need only explore the area to discover a myriad of tram tracks, and many saw-mill sites, yet that forest has flourished and the cheeky and noisy swift parrots abounded on my property until the last decade. Careful harvesting of such forest will ensure the continuing regeneration of the eucalypts.
I do not pretend that this selective logging of Tasmania’s native forests will in itself impact upon global warming, but it is important in my view that we point out to younger Tasmanians that here we on the correct path to maximising carbon retention in our forests, even further emphasising our role as the most advanced carbon conscious state. Not on our own can we reduce global warming, but we can provide a constructive model for other states, indeed, for other countries everywhere to follow.
Protecting blue gum forest areas against any logging may satisfy the needs of the Wilderness Society, but it will do nothing to halt the parrot number’s decline, and I believe shielding behind this advocacy to be both a cynical and shameful ploy. In reality, the parrot has become purely a tangible emotive symbol for wholesale prohibition on forest harvesting in those southern and eastern regions.
Conversely, successful advocacy from PFT and the FPA to encourage the government to alter policy to permit strictly managed selective logging of native forests would allow landowners such as myself to offer younger family members the opportunity to celebrate both the constructive future role their properties can have combatting global warming, and assist in the long term plan to properly re-establish swift parrots in the wild.
Tim Payne is a retired farmer and teacher, now living in Hobart. He studied at Hobart High School and graduated from the University of Tasmania with an Arts degree, and a Diploma of Education. Whilst studying, he obtained vocational employment with the Forestry Commission undertaking forest assessment in several locations around Tasmania.
