Logging in Tasmania’s Eastern Tiers near Swansea must end after Forestry Tasmania’s CEO Steve Whiteley admitted to the state parliamentary estimates yesterday that “within the time the harvesting was going on there were sightings of Swift Parrots broadly in the Eastern Tiers. Now there’s specific evidence that we shouldn’t continue harvesting and we have stopped.”
“The fact shared by Forestry Tasmania and environmental experts is that most of the remaining hundreds of Swift Parrots left on Earth are nesting and feeding in the flowering eucalypts of the Eastern Tiers this season. These nesting forests should not be destroyed now or at any time in the future. Continued logging, either when the parrots are nesting there or after they migrate back to the mainland next winter, is a death sentence for the species,” Bob Brown said in Hobart today.
Forest defenders from Bob Brown Foundation are in the northern Eastern Tiers where Forestry Tasmania is next planning to log.
“The Rockliff Government is in charge here and it has to decide if this ecocide will continue or not.”
“Just 8kms from recently smashed Swift Parrot habitat, we have thwarted the imminent logging of more habitat. Today, we witnessed Critically Endangered Swift Parrots in their breeding forests while the logging machines are on the road, but thankfully idle, as we peacefully occupied the forests. We have written to Premier Rockliff, Steve Whiteley and Forest Practices Authority’s Anne Chuter, calling for the machines to be taken out of these Swift Parrot forests and all Swift Parrot breeding habitat across Tasmania,” Bob Brown Foundation Campaigns Manager Jenny Weber said from the forests today.
“On Sunday, we have a public open day in these forests so that citizens can participate in our scientific surveys of the fastest parrots on Earth which are settling in to breed in the Eastern Tiers,” Jenny Weber said.