Critically Endangered
Swift Parrot
Lathamus discolor
Swift Parrot is a parrot in the family Psittacidae (order Psittaciformes) — Lathamus discolor, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
The swift parrot is about 25 centimetres (10 in) long and has long pointed wings and long tapering tail feathers. It is mainly green with bluish crown and red on the face above and below the beak. The adult female is slightly duller, and the juvenile has a dark brown iris and a pale orange bill.
Published measurements include mass about 64.
Range and habitat
Because they are nomadic, swift parrots can occur across a very large potential area, but settlement at a given location depends on the local availability of food. Even so, in the Tasmanian breeding range, swift parrots need both food and suitable nesting sites to occur in close proximity in order to nest at a given site. The swift parrot migrates each year across Bass Strait between Tasmania and the mainland of Australia.
The species breeds in Tasmania during the summer and migrates north to southeastern mainland Australia from Griffith-Warialda in New South Wales and west to Adelaide in the winter.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
In Tasmania, their settlement of breeding habitat is regulated by the occurrence of flowering in their two main food trees Eucalyptus globulus and Eucalyptus ovata. In the winter, their habitat use is broader, with foraging occurring on a range of flowering Eucalyptus spp. Across southeastern mainland Australia.
The species breeds in Tasmania from September to February. Wildfire caused the collapse of 62.8% of known swift parrot nest cavities (and 48.6% of nesting trees).
In crisis
The species is critically endangered, and the severe predation by introduced sugar gliders (Petaurus breviceps) on breeding females and nests in some locations has demonstrated an unexpected but potentially serious new threat. Genetic evidence for the effective population size suggests that the minimum potential population size is now around 300–500 individual swift parrots. This supports the results of earlier studies that use demographic information about swift parrots to predict that the species could be extinct by 2031.
Habitat for the critically endangered swift parrot is being "knowingly destroyed" by logging because of government failures to manage the species' survival. Modelling of demographic data predicted that the swift parrot is Critically Endangered.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Swift Parrot is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Swift Parrot, Wikidata item Q1260561. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
