Pressure is rising for urgent action to protect Australia’s fastest nectar-eater, the swift parrot, after its international status was changed to “critically endangered”. Source: Sydney Morning Herald
The bush speedster winters in Victoria and NSW, but faces a severe threat from predatory sugar gliders, which are aided by logging of its Tasmanian breeding grounds, according to scientific studies supporting the listing.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature said the bird was so imperilled its population was likely to crash by 94.7% in three generations.
“It’s time now for the Tasmanian government to take this issue seriously,” said BirdLife Australia’s head of conservation Samantha Vine.
“This up-listing now puts the bird one step away from extinction in the wild,” she said. “There is a real risk of this in the very near future.”
Ms Vine said the problem was worsened in Tasmania by the fact the bird’s fate fell under the control of the state’s Regional Forest Agreement, rather than national endangered species legislation.
“The swift parrot is a great case study of what happens to a species when the federal government vacates the field,” Ms Vine said.
The conservation group Markets for Change called for an immediate halt to all logging of swift parrot habitat in Tasmania.
Its chief executive Peg Putt said the IUCN had asked for all areas of public land that supported swift parrots to be placed under secure conservation management.
An estimated 2000 surviving birds fly over Bass Strait in autumn and spread out across Victorian and New South Wales woodlands in search of flowering gum nectar, returning to Tasmanian tree hollows to nest in spring.
Native forest logging had reduced their nest hollow options, making predation by the introduced sugar gliders easier, according to research led by Australian National University’s Dejan Stojanovic.
Dr Stojanovic said this season he had seen good numbers of the birds on Bruny island, which is free of gliders.
“But there are also a lot of birds in the Franklin forest block, south of Hobart, which is still being logged,” Dr Stojanovic said.
Efforts to address the crisis have been hampered by a breakdown in an inter-governmental swift parrot recovery team, with Tasmania absent from meetings.
The state government denied it had withdrawn from the team.
“The Commonwealth is taking steps to improve the governance of recovery teams and Tasmania is participating fully to assist the Commonwealth with that task,” a government spokesman said.
He said the government was continuing to protect swift parrots in Tasmania through strategic landscape scale conservation and policies that mitigated impacts on breeding and foraging habitat.
The federal government’s threatened species scientific committee also has a bid before it to reclassify the swift parrot as critically endangered. Its decision is expected next September.
