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Absent ‘swifties’ may be a portent of things to come

March 19, 2022 Don Knowler

The swift parrot has always provided a backdrop to the Bruny Island Bird Festival in the decade the event has been in existence.
This is not just because the parrots have put on aerial displays over the Adventure Bay Community Hall where the festival is centred. The rapid tweets of the “swifties” has also formed a soundscape to accompany music, poetry reading and speeches in the hall itself.
This year, however, the parrots will not be seen or heard. A rescheduling of the gathering from its usual staging in spring to early autumn means the migrant parrots will have already departed for their mainland wintering grounds.
The sound of silence, though, might be viewed as a portent as the festival gets underway next weekend (March 25-27) – swift parrot numbers have crashed in recent years and a recent study brings the sombre realisation that they could became extinct within the next 10 years.
When the bird festival was launched in October 2010, the swift parrot population was estimated at about 2000. They had once flown in their hundreds of thousands before European settlement.
The study compiled by a team of researchers from such groups as Birdlife Australia and the Trees Project now estimates the total population has dropped to a mere 750 birds with the dire prediction that it is in a freefall to oblivion. The Swift Parrot Protection Plan 2022 calls for the protection 60,000 hectares of prime habitat to save the species.
From the opening of the first festival, the swift parrot has been the event’s poster bird, simply because Bruny is the mainstay of a significant breeding population which is free of the pressures that the birds encounter in other parts of the state, like the loss of breeding cavities to tree-clearance and predation by an introduced species, sugar gliders.
Although Bruny is rich in habitat, swift parrots do not breed there each year if the eucalypts are not in flower and they have to go in search of nectar and pollen, and breeding sites, they require. On such occasions they stray into forests where historic breeding trees have been logged, or forests in which sugar gliders – which take an estimated 80 per cent of parrot young – are rampant.
The swift parrot, although missing in sight and sound, will be very much in focus at the festival with researcher Jennifer Sanger outlining the latest protection plan to halt the species’ decline and Dr Andrew Hingston explaining the importance of Bruny to the parrots.
The lectures on parrots are included in an extensive festival program that includes art exhibitions, performances, a market and bird-watching tours.
My contribution will be a talk on 100 years of wildlife writing in the Mercury, focusing on the legendary Michael Sharland – the Peregrine – who wrote the first of what were then termed “nature notes” in April, 1921.

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