Dejan Stojanovic was aghast. The biologist had pulled to the side of a remote dirt road in southern Tasmania, expecting to find the stately blue gum forest he’d frequented for years. He had come in search of the rare swift parrot, known to nest in the nooks of old local trees. But the bulldozers had got there first. Only disfigured brown earth remained. “I was enraged,” Stojanovic says, recalling the day in November last year. “This giant patch was taken out of the landscape. It was flattened. There were just stacks of logs and mounds of woody residue with heavy machinery parked in the middle of it. It was pretty shocking.” Scientists had been monitoring the site for a decade, gathering valuable data on the critically endangered swift parrot. Just 2000 remain in the wild.