Rob Blakers has been a landscape and wildlife photographer in Tasmania for more than four decades. He specialises in taking the time to capture images deep within the state’s wilderness that others won’t, or can’t.
Last summer he spent time in the Eastern Tiers, about two hours’ drive north-east of Hobart, climbing trees to take photos of the critically endangered swift parrot. In one shot he took a still of 12 birds in one tree. He estimates there were about 30 – about 4% of the estimated remaining wild population – nesting and feeding in the area.
“It was extraordinary,” Blakers said on Tuesday. “I have only spent a few years looking for swift parrots, but this was far above anything else I’ve ever seen – just having the consistency of them all being in this place. They are really active birds, and there isn’t anything else I’ve seen like this.”
On Tuesday Blakers returned to the same patch of forest planning to get arrested.
The Tasmanian government logging agency, Sustainable Timber Tasmania, had begun felling trees in the area as part of its native forest logging program. The photographer was part of a group of 10 protesters connected to the Bob Brown Foundation that entered the logging coupe about 8.30am and waited for the police to be called.
Other protesters left the area when asked by police. Blakers refused and was charged with trespassing. He later said he felt “surprised, then furious” when he heard the area was being logged. He said he felt he had to act.
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“My reaction was: how dare they? How can they just so brazenly ignore all of the science, all of the advice they have received, and just go in and smash this forest?” he said.
There were no swift parrots in the area at the time of logging – the species spends winters in Victoria and New South Wales and summers nesting in forests scattered across Tasmania depending on where its main food sources – blue and black gums – are flowering. But scientists say the species cannot afford to lose more of its Tasmanian summer habitat if it is to survive.
A CSIRO-published guide in 2021 estimated the swift parrot population had slumped to about 750, down from 2,000 a decade earlier. Peer-reviewed studies have found it could be extinct in 10 years if no action was taken to improve its protection, and that forestry was the greatest threat to its survival.
It is the first time Blakers, who is 65, has been arrested since December 1982, when he joined the protested against the planned Gordon-below-Franklin dam in Tasmania’s west coast wilderness.
He said the timber agency had broken its own rules by logging in an area that included more than eight trees with a trunk at least 70cm in diameter per hectare. He said trees had been felled 35m from the nesting tree he captured in a photo. Under the agency’s rules, there is supposed to be a buffer of at least 50m.
“The south-east portion of the coupe, which was alive with swift parrots through the summer, has been substantially logged,” he said. “Virtually all of the large trees here have been felled. The few older trees that remain are isolated and exposed to windthrow.”
Sustainable Timber Tasmania’s general manager for conservation and land management, Suzette Weeding, said logging of the area was being undertaken “in accordance with a certified forest practices plan”.
She said that included provisions to retain identified patches of Brooker’s gum, which has been identified as swift parrot foraging habitat.
“The certified forest practices plan states that areas around confirmed/known swift parrot nesting trees have been excluded from the harvest area,” Weeding said. “These operational provisions will allow for ongoing protection of swift parrot habitat in the area.”
