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.

The species is critically endangered,[5][6] 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.

[5][9] Habitat for the critically endangered swift parrot is being "knowingly destroyed" by logging because of government failures to manage the species' survival.

[16] A 2011 genetic study including nuclear and mitochondrial DNA found that the swift parrot was an early offshoot from a lineage giving rise to the genera Prosopeia, Eunymphicus and Cyanoramphus, diverging around 14 million years ago.

[25] Deforestation (primarily driven by native forest logging) has been an important contemporary cause of habitat loss for swift parrots.

[28] Because swift parrots prefer to breed in the most resource rich patch of food, they are able to rear their nestlings in the 'best' conditions each year.

[26] Sugar gliders are tolerant of forest disturbance, and have high rates of occupancy of swift parrot habitat in Tasmania.

[32] 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.

Although they will repeatedly return to the same locations, local occurrence may only happen intermittently depending on whether or not food (flowering trees) is available in a given year.

[27] BirdLife International has identified the following sites as being important for swift parrots:[34] Usually inhabiting: forests, woodlands, agricultural land and plantations, and also in urban areas.

[5] Further modelling showed that other aspects of their life history (sex ratio bias and shared paternity) makes their population declines worse than originally predicted.

[38] Matthew Webb and Dejan Stojanovic, two of the Eureka prize finalists from the Australian National University’s Difficult Bird Research Group, say governments have stalled on management plans that would protect known feeding and nesting habitat in Tasmania.

They found that a third of the eucalypt forest in this area had been logged between 1997 and 2016 and a quarter of old growth trees that provide nesting habitat for swift parrots had been cleared.

[42] The swift parrot has been studied since 2009 by the Difficult Bird Research Group at the Fenner School of Environment and Society of The Australian National University.