Battle for towering forest as endangered parrots fly home to breed
Swift parrots face extinction and protesters argue trees that surround its breeding site shouldn't be felled. But loggers maintain their operations are legal.
A battle is underway to protect a towering forest adjacent to a nesting site used by one of Australia’s rarest birds, the swift parrot.
A logging management company owned by Tasmania’s state government had planned to allow the felling trees that are estimated to be just 500 metres from where the birds bred last year. But conservationists worked to disrupt their efforts and drew attention to the conflict, resulting in police being called.
Estimates suggest between 300 and 750 swift parrots remain in the wild. The birds migrate to Victoria and NSW every year to forage and then return to breed in Tasmania in August.
Sustainable Timber Tasmania (STT) told Yahoo News the protests at its Eastern Tiers site, north of Hobart, were “particularly concerning and reckless” because they redirected resources of emergency responders.
“Comprehensive operational planning has been implemented to manage potential swift parrot nesting and foraging habitat within and adjacent to the harvesting area,” its general manager of land management Suzette Weeding said.
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Although swift parrots are federally protected, the Commonwealth is currently unable to interfere with state logging operations. Environmentalists have urged Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to urgently reform nature protection laws and widen its jurisdiction.
STT maintains its harvesting operations at the 58 hectare site are perfectly legal and not occurring within the actual declared breeding ground.
"[STT] remains steadfast in its commitment to transparency and integrity in all its operations and the responsible management of Tasmania’s public production forests," it claimed.
Prior to the harvest commencing, conservationists from the Bob Brown Foundation had urged the state government to place the area under secure protection, in line with a 2015 recommendation from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a global organisation that monitors the remaining populations of threatened species.
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On Tuesday, the Bob Brown Foundation lamented that swift parrots would return to breed, and discover some of their last remaining habitat was being destroyed. It pleaded with the state’s premier Jeremy Rockcliff to halt the operation.
“Ignoring conservation advice to protect all swift parrot habitat on public lands, Premier Rockliff oversees the flattening of breeding habitat and flowering feed trees of this critically endangered species. It must stop,” the Bob Brown Foundation’s Jenny Weber said.
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