No one of the Australian birds will be more deeply imprinted upon my memory than the Swift Lorikeet, associated as it is with many of the most pleasing recollections connected with my visit to that part of the world.
Their plumage so closely assimilates in colour to the leaves of the trees they frequent, and they moreover creep so quietly yet actively from branch to branch, clinging in the [sic] every possible position, that were it not for their movements and the trembling leaves, it would be difficult to perceive them without a minute examination of the tree upon which they have alighted.
~ Ornithologist John Gould, Birds of Australia, 1848
photographer ROB BLAKERS
Lonnavale Forests, 2021
Barefoot, Alex Wylie of Forestry Watch, points to the crown of a 92-metre Tasmanian blue gum named Mother Daughter. It is the tallest known blue gum in the world. I’ve come hoping that we might see a swift parrot. Just minutes from our car, in this place which borders a logging coupe, we see at least seven, swooping around the canopy of this friendly giant.
Today, with the soft grey spring sky, everything higher up appears in monochrome: grey-blue leaves, grey branches, surprisingly short for the silver-dappled trunk. The parrots themselves appear from below as dark grey, wings fluttering alongside bullet-shaped bodies.
It is only at the base of the giant tree that colours emerge: verdant moss and leaves, bark reddened by damp, pastel blue gumnuts fringed with pale yellow blossom. One of those gumnuts sits on my desk now as I write, its colour beginning to fade. These cyclical blossoms are the reason the birds come to these forests, that and the stately age of the trees, which guarantees hollows needed for the birds to nest. The hollows can take hundreds of years to form.
Alex Wylie says he saw his first swiftie the first time he scaled a large tree. It was an up close, eye-to-eye experience. And one of mixed emotion. “Nine hundred metres away, they were logging giant trees where swift parrots were undoubtedly nesting,” he says.
This is a story that I will hear many times.
Eastern Tiers, 2022
Less than two metres above our heads are three swift parrots, perched in the canopy of a small swamp gum. They are close enough to make out bluish patches on their heads, grass-green bellies and splashes of fire-engine red around their beaks. These birds are all cheerful movement, one moment upside down on a yellow blossom, the next flitting to a different branch, then off to another tree. They don’t seem to mind our presence, or really to pay us any attention at all, preoccupied with feeding and continuing a lively conversation with each other.
It's early November, and one of the warmest days of spring so far after two rainy weeks. The sun glows warmly on Lake Leake. My binoculars hang idle – I’d hoped, at best, to spot a swift parrot flying through the forest at a distance, and perhaps for a brief break in the weather. At 31 weeks’ pregnant, my state mirrors the birds as they tend their eggs and young, tucked away in tree hollows and nest boxes. It’s a moment of feeling at ease with the world.
We are here to help with a swift parrot survey led by Charley Gros and Erik Hayward, of the Bob Brown Foundation.
Swift parrots spend most of the year on mainland Australia, migrating to lutruwita/Tasmania each spring. They tour the island looking for a place to breed, a place with “food and a bedroom”, explains Charley Gros. For swift parrots, food means flowering blue gums (Eucalyptus globulus) or swamp gums (Eucalyptus ovata). Where they settle depends upon where food is abundant. As eucalypts don’t flower every year, the birds’ nesting sites shift. A bedroom means a tree hollow- preferably small enough to keep larger predators out. These tend only to form in older, weathered trees – at least 150 years old, maybe more.
Gros shows us which trees are preferred by the parrots and how to spot them. Eucalpytus dalrympleana, or white gums, line the shores of the lake, interspersed with flowering swamp gums. A slender and elegant white gum dappled with shades of grey, E. dalrympleana is recognisable by the “sock” of stringy bark around its base. Several nearby trees clearly have nesting hollows. We also spot a parrot entering one of the white nesting boxes dotted around the lake.
Much smaller than a rosella, Lathamus discolor is the fastest parrot in the world. It can cover about 100 kilometres in an hour. By the end of summer, chicks will be ready to complete their journey across the Bass Strait – a direct flight with no stopovers – to reach warmer winters.
Now that have got our eye (and ear) in for swift parrots, our next step is to find out more about their distribution in these forests. It’s the first survey of the season. The first logging road we travel down does not look promising. The eucalypts are young, and we do not see any in flower. There are some strikingly large banksias, but the understorey lacks the richness found in older forests. The second one has some larger, hollow-bearing trees, and budding stands of E. ovata, globulus, and dalrympleana. This is a place for Charley Gros and Erik Hayward to return to when the trees are in full flower.
We have more success, of sorts, on our final stop, active logging coupe SH045A, where Gros and Hayward had camped overnight. The pair were greeted by swifts in the morning as they rose. There are log loaders, and piles of recently sorted logs – many of significant girth. A small proportion are classified as higher-grade logs, but most seem destined for the chipper. There are still many large trees here, though they will likely be felled in the coming week. The understorey here is more diverse, and we spot a devil scat, the second we’ve come across in the day.
I ask Gros to recount his morning encounter with the swifts. Just as he describes the call made by the swift parrot, and his conflicted feelings on finding them here in an active logging coupe, we hear their distinctive flying call. Two swifts zoom overhead. I’m elated to hear and see the birds. I am elated to be in the bush. Tomorrow these trees might be bulldozed. In a handful of years, the swift parrots might be gone. In this moment, they are here.
A forest emblem
The fate of the swiftie is closely tied to the health of the forests. While they once numbered about 10,000 breeding pairs, with flocks of hundreds and even thousands recorded in the 1950s, today there are estimated to be just 750 to 2,000 birds left.
Charismatic and critically endangered, they have become a poster child for the conservation of Tasmanian forests. Anti-forestry protests feature green-costumed protesters, and threatened forests and trees are named after the birds: Denison swift parrot sanctuary, Lathamus Keep; a popular “Keep Tassie Wild” sticker simply features the head of a swift – no slogan needed. Charley Gros calls them the “greenest parrot on earth”, so perhaps they are an appropriate emblem, given that the Greens party was born in Tasmania from the iconic Franklin dam protest.
In some camps on our island, swift parrot sightings are regarded with suspicion. I’ve overheard and read remarks about swift parrots “popping up” in and areas earmarked for logging and development. Unlike, say, the orange-bellied parrot - another critically endangered, migratory bird, which generally breeds, more conveniently, within 20km of Melaleuca in the far south, there is no single area that can be set aside to protect swift parrots. They tend to turn up in different places each year, just as logging is beginning.
. . .
The campaign to protect swifts is not just about saving a single species from extinction.
After our sojourn at the 92-metre blue gum in the Lonnavale Forests, we walk through the nearby forestry coupe known as DN007B, on a beautiful soft track cut by Forestry Watch. Alongside myrtle, it is dominated by the stands of giant blue gum, the biggest ones I’ve ever seen. The swift parrots that we sight during our lunch stop are only a small part of what makes this walk special.
Dr Matthew Webb, who has run the swift parrot population monitoring program for over a decade, has not seen any other patch of wet blue gum forest that even vaguely approaches DN007B, but believes this type of forest would once have been widespread.
“This is the last bit. It shouldn’t need a threatened species to protect it.”
This argument is not going to sway industry, though. Intrinsic value is not seen as a convincing reason to protect a place – too subjective, too soft, too green. Swift parrots, on the other hand, have been observed, analysed, broken down into data, over many years. There is hard evidence to say that this is ideal swift parrot habitat of the kind needed to support their continued existence. And yet …
At the end of our walk through coupe DN007B, we emerge at the shattered remains of what until recently would have been similar forest, coupe DN007C. The two used to make up a single coupe which had been marked as a Swift Parrot Important Breeding Area (SPIBA). In his former role at DPIPWE, and later while working at ANU, Matthew Webb provided formal advice against logging the area. A few years later, the area was divided into two separate coupes, and its SPIBA designation removed. Webb believes there would almost certainly have been nesting swift parrots at the time DN007C was logged.
This incident does not seem to be an anomaly. During his work surveying swift parrots, Webb recalls seeing “more coupes than I can remember actively being clear-felled while the swift parrots were nesting in there or feeding”. In one 2015 incident in a nearby forest, contractors reported seeing swift parrots. On investigation, Webb found a nest. Logging operations ceased a couple of days later, and restarted in a subsequent year.
In Arctic Dreams, the late seminal nature writer Barry Lopez recalls a conversation with a frustrated Canadian scientist: “I hate as a biologist having to reduce the behaviour of animals to numbers. I hate it. But if we are going to stand our ground against [development] we must produce numbers, because that’s all they will listen to.”
This belief now seems somewhat naïve. The reality is that even the presence of the swift parrot – with hard data gathered over many years to support its conservation - may not be enough to protect the habitat it depends on. Under the Regional Forestry Agreement, forestry operations are exempt from the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
“What is the point of the Act”, a friend once remarked, “if all the industries that are actually pushing species to extinction don’t have to follow it?”
Over years spent trying to protect the bird, Webb has seen the population plunge from thousands to hundreds.
“We’re not managing for the species, we’re just managing the rate of loss, which is a really sad thing to watch over time. Even though we know what they require, we haven’t come to a resolution that’s going to give this species what it needs. So what chance do our other species have?”
The swift parrot poses a question: What value do we place on wild places and creatures?
A mysterious predator
As well as habitat loss, another equally potent threat has devastated the swift parrot population. Two decades ago, scientists noticed something worrying: there were about two males for every swift parrot female found – a clue that something was preying upon females in the nest. A later study led by Dr Dejan Stojanovic discovered that tiny, large-eyed sugar gliders were raiding the nests, devouring chicks and even adult birds. These formerly unsuspected culprits were previously assumed to be a species native to Tasmania. A genetic study overturned this.
This finding suggested an answer to another question about swift parrots: why do they undertake their long annual migration from the mainland to Tasmania? Is it perhaps an evolutionary response to predation?
Two islands off the east coast still offer the swift parrots a refuge from sugar gliders: Bruny Island and Maria Island. In years where swift parrots breed on these islands, their breeding success is improved. The problem is, there is not enough food on these islands alone to support a genetically diverse population of swift parrots.
Conservationists tend to emphasise habitat destruction as the greatest threat to swift parrots. Is this the case, or are sugar gliders a more pressing threat, as others have claimed? Swift parrot expert Dr Andrew Hingston says, “That’s a really difficult question, something people are arguing about, and I don’t think we can argue about it. These things all interact with each other. They are all having serious impact. They all need to be addressed if we’re going to save this bird from extinction.”
There is increasing evidence that the greater the loss of habitat in an area, the more likely any nesting swift parrots are to be eaten by sugar gliders, Hingston says, possibly because the species are concentrated together. He hopes that with human ingenuity, the sugar glider threat can be addressed.
Seeing swift parrots up close is a simple pleasure. We can think of going into the bush as a way of getting away from society, but nature also connects us to our fellow humans across space and time. Maybe a mother has stood in this place, introducing her child to the birds for the first time, explaining where they fit into the seasonal cycle. Perhaps an elder has looked up here, enjoying the return of a familiar presence and remembering past times. These birds, like all other species, have had diverse human stories and meanings attached. While these stories may not have survived, elements of our response to nature may be universal, a link to past, and hopefully future, generations.
Fiona Howie is a teacher of English and history with a Bachelor of Advanced Arts (Honours) from the University of Sydney. She lives on the sunny eastern shore of nipaluna/Hobart with her partner and infant son.
