The race is not always to the swiftBRUNY 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...Continue reading
from Asia http://ift.tt/1o2vKoj
EmoticonEmoticon