Bird-watching is worth more than $280 million each year to the Australian economy and for this reason Birdlife Australia says it makes sense to protect our birds.
This time last year the birding organisation set out to put a price on the heads of the birds in economic terms and found in its survey that the birding bonanza largely benefitted regional communities where the more uncommon species were found.
The finding of the economic survey were very much in my thoughts when earlier this month I attended the launch of an exhibition of photographs of swift parrots at the Wild Island gallery in Salamanca Place.
The swift parrot is critically endangered and all the photographs by Rob Blakers and Antoine Chretien had been taken in areas of old-growth forest scheduled to be logged soon.
Without getting into a polemic about an industry that has long been a mainstay of Tasmania’s economy, I found myself asking the question whether the value of the handful of coupes to be cut down came anywhere near the financial worth of the swift parrots using the soon-to-be destroyed trees as vital feeding and breeding habitat over the years.
Forest clearance which has seen 70 per cent of the swift parrot’s favoured blue gums logged since European settlement is the main cause of their decline, although the birds are also killed by introduced sugar gliders.
The beautiful “swifties” – a migratory parrot that only breeds in Tasmania – is one of the “most see” species that not only attract mainland bird-watchers to the state but also international birding tourists on an ever-increasing scale.
The BirdLife Australia report found the surge in birding interest during Covid-19 – when people discovered wildlife on their doorsteps – and the later lifting of travel restrictions had been a boon to country communities which had been hit hardest by the pandemic downturn.
One bird tour operator in northern Queensland said that he had switched his focus on wildlife tourism in general, to concentrate on birders.
Among regions benefiting from the birding tourist boom has been Tasmania, in particular Bruny Island which boasts all 12 Tasmanian species found nowhere else on earth.
Even before the post-pandemic revival, Tasmania had been a lure for birders simply because of its abundance of endemic species for such a small area. Victoria, for instance, has none, and New South Wales only one.
Although not purely Tasmanian by virtue of it migrating to the mainland in winter, the swift parrot is firmly on the birder’s list of species to be spotted.
But the parrots are becoming increasingly difficult to see. The latest analysis of their numbers has found there may be only 750 in existence, down from 2000 a decade ago.
This is a far cry from the Aboriginal era. The early European explorers reported swift parrots flying in their tens of thousands.
The exhibition runs to May 31.