The Forest Practices Authority has cleared the Tasmanian logging coupe at the centre of a Bob Brown Foundation and Wilderness Society campaign against Bunnings timber supplier Porta, confirming no swift parrots were observed breeding within the harvest area during an independent ecologist survey. That is according to correspondance obtained by Wood Central, in which Anne Chuter, the Chief Forest Practices Officer, responded to Jenny Weber, Campaign Manager for the Bob Brown Foundation, concerning coupe WT003E in southern Tasmania.
Under the Swift Parrot Sightings Response Protocol, the FPA was notified on February 6 of new audible records from an acoustic recorder within WT003E and promptly advised against harvesting any potential habitat within 500 metres of the records until an FPA ecologist could undertake a site survey.
That survey took place on 10 February 2026, with the regulator confirming that no swift parrots were observed breeding within the harvest area and that potential habitat had been managed strictly in line with the agreed management approach set out in the Threatened Species Adviser.
Writing on behalf of the FPA, Chuter noted that “potential swift parrot habitat has been managed in accordance with the agreed management approach set out in the Threatened Species Adviser,” pointing parties to the regulator’s Compliance unit for any further review of the operation.
It comes as the Wilderness Society has petitioned Bunnings to drop Porta as a supplier, alleging that logs transported from WT003E to Porta’s mill carry “critical swift parrot habitat” into the hardware chain under its PEFC and Responsible Wood certification. The Wilderness Society campaign cited 68 summer-period swift parrot recordings from the Wielangta forest and ties the Porta supply link to donation-driven petitions urging consumers to email the retailer directly.
Steve Dobbyns, Executive Chair of Forest and Wood Communities Australia, however, rejected the activist position, saying “the Wilderness Society and the Bob Brown Foundation are campaigning against Bunnings and soliciting donations using misleading and false claims of ‘logging in critically endangered swift parrot habitat’, which have been dismissed by Tasmania’s independent regulator, the Forest Practices Authority.”
It comes after new research, published in Australian Forestry, raised new questions about why the endangered swift parrots’ habitat is in decline. Published by ecologist Dr S.J. Grove, it revealed that birds’ collapse, which could be functionally extinct by the end of the decade, is driven by predation of nesting females and their broods by the introduced sugar glider, but crucially, not by native forest harvesting.
Grove tests what he calls the ‘forest habitat narrative’ against what he terms the ‘predation narrative’, finding neither the straightforward habitat-loss hypothesis nor its more nuanced disturbance-linked variant well-supported by the evidence, in contrast to the predation hypothesis, which he describes as grounded in empiricism and supported by robust statistical modelling. The review concludes that “an all-out focus on predation mitigation remains the only strategy with at least the potential to avoid species extinction.”
The swift parrot campaign has drawn international attention for more than two years, with Wood Central in 2024 reporting that Leonardo DiCaprio used his 62 million Instagram followers to demand Australian governments halt harvesting near nesting sites, citing the 750 remaining birds in Tasmania’s breeding range.
- For more information: Grove, S. J. (2026). What is driving the continued decline of critically endangered swift parrots? a re-examination of the research papers. Australian Forestry, 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049158.2026.2634414
