by David Owen
Their speed on land has not been fully appreciated. The general perception is that, because they are short-legged and have an awkward-looking gait, they are incapable of running quickly. Guiler seemed to confirm this. ‘It lopes along at about 3–4 kilometres per hour, but when chased it can make about 12 kilometres per hour for a short time. Several times we have caught devils by running after them when they have escaped while being handled.’24
Others have different opinions. David Randall and a wildlife officer friend, Reuben Hooper, were discussing the extent to which the devil could be an efficient chase-and-catch predator. They decided upon an empirical test. Randall released a devil which Hooper chased. The devil outsprinted Hooper, then suddenly stopped, turned and hissed at him, and he had to leap over it.
Artist and naturalist George Davis has had a lifelong interest in Tasmania’s flora and wildlife. He believes that in their wild state, with no roadkill or livestock, devils have no choice but to hunt and catch, and he can testify to their fleetness of foot—he once chased one in a Land Rover. The Tasmanian Government’s environment website states that devils have been clocked running on a flat road at 25 kmh for up to 1.5 kilometres,25 and at Cradle Mountain Menna Jones clocked one running in her headlights at 35 kmh for 300 metres.
What is certain is that devils have great stamina. David Pemberton’s fieldwork in the 1980s involved radio-tracking individuals throughout the night. A typical pattern emerged: an animal leaves its den after dark and, at a steady lope, uses tracks and forest edges to investigate known food-source areas. Bursts of speed are intermingled with periods of stillness, lasting up to half an hour. That pattern suggests an ambush predator. Towards the end of the night the devil sets up a rapid nonstop lope to return to its den around dawn. Its ability to travel a long way, at a good pace and quietly, is impressive and is a typical attribute of the polyphagous carnivores—those which according to dictionaries have an ‘excessive’ desire to eat. Devil speeds of greater than 10 kmh are common for extended periods through the night, three or four times per week.
A famed devil story that happens to be true relates to sheep in shearing sheds, and the problem likely to beset one if a leg slips through the flooring slats and becomes stuck. Lionel Grey, a cull shooter, says he has come across a sheep in a shed ‘with the hock chewed off it’26, as has Helen Gee, who farms at Buckland. Sceptics wonder if this is another farmers’ myth to tarnish the devil, asking why sheep would be left overnight in a shearing shed. But they frequently are, being penned overnight for an early start in the morning. And because many farms have been cleared of even small stands of timber, devils perforce set up dens under buildings, including shearing sheds.
Older Tasmanian houses sometimes have devil dens in their foundations, having possibly been in use for more than a hundred years, with no one being aware of their presence, though smell and noise are usually the giveaway. Nick Mooney is often called to remove devils from under houses. His preferred method is to install a one-way cat flap at the den entrance once any juveniles are large enough that they are naturally emerging and using other, secondary dens.
He has had a few memorable den experiences. One couple reported devil pups under their house and wanted to know if they could be shifted. Mooney talked them out of it for that season. The husband was a school soccer coach and after one match he brought two teams’ jumpers home to wash. He left them in a bag on the verandah overnight and they subsequently disappeared. He assumed they had been stolen. Mooney reckoned otherwise. Knowing where the devils were denned, under the kitchen floor, he popped a plank—and there were the jumpers. He recollects that they fished up about 30 using a wire. None had been chewed and after being washed were fine. They retrieved a number of other items as well, including a pillow.
At another house, a litter of young devils was attracted to a feather-filled doona being aired on a clothesline. They pulled it off the line and tried to drag it through a hole into the house’s foundations. They managed to get most of it in before it burst, showering the foundations with feathers. Mooney recalls wet black noses with white feathers stuck on them, and plenty of devil sneezing. He bought the owner a new doona.
During 2004, David Pemberton and his partner Rosemary Gales hand-reared two devils, Donny and Clyde, who made their den under a bed in a spare room. They regularly took items of newly washed clothing to the den. By the time Donny and Clyde were moved to the wild, they had lined their den with the equivalent of three basket-loads of clean washing.
A fact that could be mistaken for a myth is the tendency of devils to all go to the toilet in the same spot. The use of communal latrines is not common among animals. Hyaenas and ratels (honey badgers), two other species associated with the devil through convergent evolution, also use communal latrines. They are instances of an apparently solitary animal engaging in at least chemical social interaction. Depending on population numbers, dozens of devils will defecate in one area—usually near a creek crossing or other water source—for reasons of communication barely understood, and further calling into question the ‘solitary’ tag. The same spot will be reused by a devil after an absence of a week or more, which implies a form of territoriality. Devil latrines could be described as community noticeboards; they may tell transients that a particular area is full, and they may tell competing males something about female availability. They may even have an inter-species communication function: spotted-tailed quoll scats have been found at devil latrines.
Nick and Kate Mooney have hand-reared many orphaned devils for rehabilitation and have little difficulty toilet-training them because of the innate behavioural tendency to use one latrine.
Devil scats are huge and in them, as befits an unfussy feeder, are to be found a great variety of objects. So big are they relative to the animal’s size that they have often been cited as evidence of the continued existence of thylacines. An average scat is about 15 centimetres long, but they can be up to 25 centimetres long.
Baby and juvenile devils are cute, playful, mischievous—and noisy, especially during the night. They climb whatever they can and play games which involve ambushing, chasing and dragging one another by the ear. David Pemberton, while rearing orphans, has observed that juvenile devils use their tails to send a range of excitable and nervous signals, with the tail bent stiffly toward the ground and twitching energetically. (Raised tails in most animals are generally considered the demonstration of a highly excitable state.)
Yet devils would not make good pets. Even little ones have formidably sharp teeth and vice-like jaws. Above all, once weaned they become asocial, which is surely why Aborigines, who quickly took to dogs after European settlement, did not keep them as pets. This hasn’t prevented some Australian scientists suggesting that endangered marsupials be tested as pets, with a view to breeding them up. A report on ABC Radio’s PM program began with host Mark Colvin introducing the topic this way: ‘Imagine curling up in front of a winter fire with a Tasmanian devil at your feet, or an eastern quoll on your lap . . .’27 Having said this hand-reared devils do like their comfort— some of the Mooneys’ winter orphans would gather at the fireplace and wait for the fire to be lit.
Their protected status has not prevented a number of US exotic pet websites advertising devils. The international trade in exotic living things is vast and much of it illegal. It would be surprising if devils didn’t form part of it, because they would sell handsomely, thanks in part to the high profile of the Warner Bros. cartoon character Taz. They are easy to catch, feed and house. But Tasmania’s rural population is small and interconnected and locals involved in such a trade would have to go about their cruel business with great caution.
An incident in Perth, Western Australia, in July 1997 appears to confirm that there is such a trade. As reported by CNN, a woman found:
an unusual illegal immigrant hiding under her car: a Tasmanian Devil . . . The Department of Conservation and Land Management did a little checking around. There are 16 registered licensees in
Western Australia who are permitted to keep Tasmanian Devils, and none of them was missing any. The department believes the animal was imported illegally and kept as a pet before escaping.28
US Navy aircraft carriers occasionally visit Hobart, and in one year in the 1990s strong rumours were about that a number of sailors with Tasmanian devil tattoos—the animal was their group mascot—swapped or attempted to swap handguns for live devils.
Devil experts are occasionally asked if the animals can interbreed with dogs, the unspoken reason being a desire to breed a presumably omnipotent fighting hound.
Cruelty and ignorance have hurt the devil in many ways. One or two individual farmers are believed to have had an annual kill rate of over 1000 a year, through strychnine poisoning, trained dogs and mass trapping. George Davis witnessed a particularly cruel method of killing them. A northern farmer placed a 220-litre water tank in the ground and ran a baited drop-plank over it, luring devils onto the plank which then tipped them into the tank, where they fought and ate one another.
An east coast farmer used to kill them by nailing a baited shark hook to a tree trunk, at a height that would hook the devil on tiptoes so that it couldn’t escape and would die in agony. A head keeper at Bonorong Wildlife Park witnessed fifteen shot devils being thrown on a bonfire. A senior Parks and Wildlife officer was heard to say that while he would avoid a wombat on the road, devils were fair game.
In 1993 Mooney found 32 dead devils around poisoned sheep carcasses, near a popular trout fishing spot in the central highlands. All had had their saddles skinned off. It appeared to be a mass killing for perhaps a floor mat, and such a mat may well adorn a central highlands fishing shack.
In 1952 David Fleay wrote:
Fur trappers who still carry on large scale operations during the winters of western Tasmania heartily dislike the snare-despoiling Devil, and often go to extreme lengths to rid a particular area of these animals before the season begins. An old pine shack below the frowning Frenchman Range is still known as the Devil’s Camp—thanks to the pitiless work carried out by the first snarers there who poisoned and trapped the unfortunate carnivores so that their whitened bones lay in that vicinity for many years afterwards.29
The apparent capacity of the devil to survive in both ‘plague’ and dangerously low numbers, despite human interference, seems to be another of its remarkable features, but to believe so is to perpetuate the myth that the natural world, like an ageless superheavyweight boxer, can continue to absorb everything thrown at it. And it may be that a combination of human-induced factors is fully or partly responsible for the outbreak of the devastating DFTD, from which the devil may not recover. Little is yet known about the disease beyond the fact that it spreads through populations and kills individual animals within about six months. Half of Tasmania was affected by the beginning of 2005. There is no historical account of a devil with gross external tumours, which indicates that DFTD could be a ‘new’ disease and thus may be associated with human activity. An early twentieth-century decline—if it did happen—is more likely to have been linked to thylacine trapping and the snaring of possums and wallabies than to disease.
Can devil numbers sustain ‘everything’? The question hinges at least in part on ‘numbers’. Despite decades of research, devil population shifts defy easy explanation. George Davis recalls that, as a boy in Pelham during the early 1940s, the capture of a devil caused excitement because the creature was so rare. David Randall remembers them being very uncommon everywhere in the 1950s, and also in low numbers in the late 1960s. Yet by the early 1970s and again in the late 1980s, farmers in the east and northeast complained of ‘plague numbers’ threatening the sheep industry.
Devils don’t always benefit from food provided by roadkill.(Courtesy Nick Mooney)
Interference with food supply may affect devils. Davis recalls night shoots when a bag of three or four wallabies was considered good. The introduction of spotlight shooting in the late 1960s, at the same time as a great increase in the amount of agricultural browsing land, meant that suddenly hundreds of carcasses were being dumped every night. More food meant more devils, and consequently a human-induced alteration to natural population dynamics.
Roads might be another influence on devils where roadkills are common, for instance near barley fields which are particularly attractive to wallabies. Do devils live in greater numbers near roads which offer up a steady supply of roadkill? It is impossible to know what influence human factors have on devil movements and especially their den sites, which are the critical factors in the home range location. If, over time, human activities have disrupted naturally occurring devil genetic dispersal patterns, the final outcome may be population chaos followed by extinction.
2
EVOLUTION AND EXTINCTION
Late into the night with our little boat anchored just outside the weedline about thirty metres from shore we heard an ungodly commotion. Spotlight quickly activated to find a Tasmanian devil tearing open the tightly wrapped package of sandwiches which it had somehow managed to get out of an airtight lunch box. In the couple of minutes it took to start the outboard motor and push the boat through the weeds to shore the devil and complete contents of the lunch box were gone. The devil had obviously eaten in silence until it got to the sandwiches. It must have got frustrated with the plastic wrap hence the sudden noisy outburst.
BRIAN GEORGE, SORELL
Long ago, in the Dreamtime, deep in the Tasmanian bush, Wing-go-wing the Tasmanian devil finished eating her dinner. She didn’t, though, have a full stomach and was still hungry. She started hunting again and spied a kangaroo. ‘This would taste just right and fill up the hollow in my stomach,’ she said. Ooroo, the kangaroo, didn’t see Wing-go-wing approaching . . . creeping . . . unseen. Wing-go-wing chased after Ooroo, snapping at its legs. He bounded off as fast as he could, but Wing-go-wing caught hold of Ooroo. Wing-go-wing bit off the bottom of Ooroo’s legs and the end of his tail. Ooroo, though, escaped and bounced into the thick scrub. Wing-go-wing was happy with this little snack and quickly ate what she caught. Ooroo, the now much shorter kangaroo, turned into a pademelon. The pademelon has short legs and a short tail. The pademelon is now always careful of Tasmanian devils and, to this day, wishes it had its longer legs and its longer tail. Wing-go-wing finished her kangaroo nibble but was still hungry. She thought possum would taste nice for dessert. Be-U, the possum, sat in his tree having witnessed what had just happened to Ooroo and he thought he would teach this Tasmanian devil a lesson. Be-U hid behind a stump of an old tree. Wing-go-wing approached, sniffing for possum. Be-U jumped out, holding a sharp stick in one of his paws. He struck Wing-go-wing across the neck and the devil screamed loudly. Be-U, with his other paw, threw white sand at Wing-go-wing and it stuck in the cut. Some of the sand went into Wing-go-wing’s mouth. Be-U scrambled up a tree to see Wing-go-wing below. The devil’s throat was now as white as Mount Wellington snow. From now on other bush animals could see the devil coming before Wing-go-wing could bite them. Wing-go-wing screamed at Be-U. The devil’s voice, though, was now harsh and gravely. The sand had changed the devil’s noise. The other bush animals would hear her coming and know to run away before it was too late. Be-U, hanging by his tail, laughed at Wing-go-wing, and was very happy that he could help his bush friends. But he knew he would always have to be watchful, especially at night, of Tasmanian devils who were hungry . . . and angry . . .1
The Tasmanian devil has the distinction of being the world’s largest living marsupial carnivore, though since an adult male devil seldom weighs more than 12 kilograms the species cannot be compared with dominant placental carnivores in other parts of the world, such as lions, tigers and wolves. Many factors, operating across millions of years, have resulted in the devil occupying this unique position.
These prints on an iced-over creek demonstrate the unusual gait of the devil, which may have descended from an arboreal ancestor that hopped along branches. (Courtesy Nick Mooney)
Aust
ralia once formed part of the southern hemisphere super-continent of Gondwana, together with what would become South America, Antarctica, Madagascar, New Zealand, India and Africa. While it is not known precisely how Australia’s marsupials evolved, fragmentary fossil evidence suggests that lineages of protomarsupial stocks originating in South America journeyed across the then-temperate Antarctic landmass. Australia became a continent about 45 million years ago, floating free with a cargo of flora and fauna that would evolve in isolation until the continent collided with the Indonesian archipelago. That isolation enabled marsupials to diversify free of competition, but the ‘floating laboratory’ created competition of another kind, in the form of major climate changes brought about by variation in global weather patterns, Australia’s northward movement towards the equator, and the southern hemisphere ocean, wind and pressure changes created by that movement. Enormous inland seas and tropical forests came and went, periodically giving way to colder, drier conditions.
Although the continent had at times supported big mountain ranges, its general overall flatness provided little protection from the subantarctic winds that scoured away much of its surface. The remaining nutrient-poor soils, increasing surface salinity, decreasing rainfall, and extreme fluctuations between day-time heat and night-time cold, determined the long-term evolution of unique, often sparse, tree, plant and grass forms. Australia’s herbivores developed accordingly. They became either nocturnal or crepuscular (active at dawn and dusk) browsers and grazers. There were none of the vast herds of grazing animals that developed on the lush grasslands of Africa and North America, for example, so there was limited scope for predators.
The devil’s unknown ancestors may well have been tree-dwellers, eating insects, nectar, fruits and young leaves. As those creatures grew larger, their hind legs may have begun to operate in unison to cope with moving along branches, leading eventually to the hopping gait that is characteristic of many marsupials. This may even explain the devil’s unusual gait.