ONE of Australia’s rarest and fastest birds, the swift parrot, seems to be plummeting in number, and logging has been blamed.Sightings of the flashy red and green parrot have declined sharply in its winter home of flowering eucalypt woodlands in Victoria and NSW, surveys show.Checks by 400 volunteers, conducted under a federal-state recovery plan for the bird, found that instead of improving, the number of sightings declined from 2.5 per survey in 2000 to 0.5 last year.Already listed as endangered, with fewer than 1000 breeding pairs in 2003, the swift parrot might be close to critically endangered, said Chris Tzaros, conservation manager of the non-government organisation Birds Australia.