Saving the swift parrot

BRUNY island, off south-eastern Tasmania, is a home to the swift parrot. Small and green, with patches of red and blue, it breeds only in Tasmania, feeding on nectar from the blue gum tree, a eucalypt, and migrating to south-eastern Australia for the winter. But the logging of Tasmanian forests has destroyed its habitat. (And the parrots’ habit of crashing into office windows of Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, does them no favours.) Only 2,000 individuals may survive.

In November the state government stopped logging on Bruny Island after an outcry over the parrot’s plight. An earlier study by Dejan Stojanovic, of the Australian National University, and colleagues had revealed how logging and land-clearing for farms in Tasmania had left swifts, which breed in the trunks of old gum trees, vulnerable to predation by sugar gliders, an introduced possum.

Unlike the swift parrot’s other Tasmanian breeding grounds, Bruny Island has no sugar gliders. But the Wilderness Society, a conservation group, says that the birds will still be harmed if logging goes ahead. It estimates that the logging planned on Bruny Island for the next two years would destroy almost 40% of the parrots’ habitat there.

Loggers and environmentalists have long disagreed on what should be allowed in the forests that cover about half of Tasmania. Both sides signed a peace deal four years ago under a former Labor state government that protected more forests and bought off loggers. A UNESCO-listed world heritage wilderness area was expanded to embrace the Styx valley west of Hobart, thick with eucalyptus trees thought to be 600 years old. The listed region now covers almost a quarter of Tasmania.

But the truce did not last. On becoming premier two years ago, Will Hodgman of the conservative Liberal party said he was tearing up the deal, concerned that his state’s growth lagged the rest of Australia. He now proposes opening up some protected areas for logging.

UNESCO wants commercial logging in the listed forests banned. It will soon report to the federal government, also Liberal, which is responsible for protecting Australia’s world heritage regions. Meanwhile, as it promises a “management plan” for the swift parrot, Mr Hodgman’s government seems keen to expand logging outside Bruny Island. Protesters against plans to log in Lapoinya, in north-western Tasmania, were arrested last month. Some predict that Tasmania could be heading back to the old days of greens and lumberjacks at loggerheads.