To employ a totally over-used pun when it comes to bird-watching, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by joining the great swift parrot hunt on the mainland this autumn.
I had missed out on seeing swift parrots in Tasmania – the only place they nest – last breeding season and so I thought I’d seize the opportunity of finding them in their winter habitat on the south-eastern mainland. At the same time, I’d do a little bit of citizen science by adding to a census on the parrot’s fast-declining number.
BirdLife Australia had sent out an urgent plea for volunteers in light of the latest swift parrot research which now puts their total number at fewer than 300 individual birds.
Loss of the parrot’s favoured habitat of blue gum forests in Tasmania has long been considered the prime reason for their fall in number and they are also known to be suffering loss of their winter feeding areas across Victoria and into southern New South Wales.
The ironbark forests favoured by the swift parrots in winter are also being lost to logging, a situation exacerbated by the added destruction of old-growth trees during the catastrophic bush fires the summer before last.
Packing my bags for a trip to Melbourne late last month, I packed a pair of hiking boots after discovering that among the sites where swift parrots had been recorded was a nature reserve inside the city limits which would not involve a road trip on my time-poor schedule.
The given location, the Yarra Bend Park, was in fact less famous for its swift parrots than its colony of grey-headed flying foxes.
Although I knew that I’d be fortunate to spot the parrots in the limited time I had available, I none-the-less studied the instructions for the survey carefully. These involved taking a five-minute survey of a 50-metre radius at a fixed site before moving on to another. Observers would also be required to estimate the availability of nectar and water.
In my brief series of counts I didn’t find any swift parrots but I made a note of other species as required, including the pied currawong whose call is far more melodious compared with the two species of currawong, the black and the grey, which are found in Tasmania.
The survey is taking place over two six-week periods, and hundreds of birdwatchers are scanning all the forests where swift parrots have been seen in the past.
Alarm bells started to sound over the parrot in December when a count by Australia National University researchers revealed that estimates of numbers – as high as 800 pairs – were far lower than previously believed. The critically-endangered swift parrot is one of only two parrot species which are migratory, both found in Tasmania. The other is the orange-bellied parrot, also on the critically endangered list.