Former Australian senator and Greens co-founder Bob Brown says he has been arrested in Tasmania while staging a protest against logging.
Protesters on Monday began a "peaceful occupation" of swift parrot habitat near Swansea in the state's North-East, where they claim the birds are being pushed out of their usual breeding and feeding forests by intensified logging.
Mr Brown was arrested twice in two days in December 2020, also over anti-logging protests in swift parrot habitat in Tasmania's Eastern Tiers.
He said he was arrested on Tuesday for "upholding the laws of nature and the international Biodiversity Convention", and was charged on summons with trespass.
"(The parrots) cross the Bass Strait in three hours, whereas it takes the ferry all day or all night, and they find where the eucalypts are blossoming and that's where ... their biggest population will be," Mr Brown told AAP.
"This year, it's in the North-East of Tasmania ... and instead of protecting that habitat as the Biodiversity Convention would have us, they're logging."
The former senator joined the protest on Monday and camped out overnight at the site, where two people had tied themselves to machinery and one staged a tree-sit on Tuesday.
By the afternoon, police had also arrested the two protesters tied to machinery, the Bob Brown Foundation said.
"It's broadscale destruction," Mr Brown said.
"The current coupe that they're logging is 200 hectares and, significantly, what they're doing is taking out the big trees, and they're the very ones that these birds need for nesting."
Mr Brown questions the legality of logging in the area.
The state's North-East highlands are home to nesting and foraging swift parrots, which the Bob Brown Foundation says are rapidly approaching extinction.
Mr Brown is calling on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to end logging in Australia's native forests.
Bob Brown Foundation campaigner Erik Hayward said on Monday that protesters' requests to save swift parrot habitat had been ignored by the Tasmanian premier, the Forest Practices Authority and Forestry Tasmania.
"The forests of the Eastern Tiers are some of the last remaining habitats for the swift parrot," he said in a statement.