Historically, little penguins had always nested on the shores of the Bass Strait, but as coastal towns like Stanley developed, fewer and fewer penguins came ashore. At one point, Stanley was down to just a few straggling penguins that were forced to reside under people's beachfront homes and beneath the tombstones at the town's seaside cemetery. To give the penguins better digs, Stanley residents built burrows on the lower slopes of the Nut, just a few hundred feet from the edge of town. As a result, Stanley's penguin population began to thrive.
We got the phone number for a penguin tour service from a flyer on the window of a local restaurant, and when we called, a cheery woman said a penguin van would pick us up at nine-ish. This was going to be another nighttime operation.
In the meantime, we decided to look around the town. Signs in pastelpainted tearooms and food shops offered Devonshire tea, abalone cakes, crayfish sandwiches, and fresh whole fish. At a shop called Hursey Seafoods, the fish were more than just fresh. Hursey's was more like an aquarium than a fish store. All kinds of fish—including tropical ones— were darting around giant Jacuzzi-sized tanks filled with seawater. A handwritten sign read, “BEWARE!! Please do not put hands in the tanks.” While we were ogling the swimming seafood, Chris walked in. Earlier, he had stopped by Hursey's and ordered two dozen Tasmanian rock oysters and a live fish called a bastard trumpeter. The proprietors had asked him to come back in twenty minutes. It would take them that long to net his purchase.
Back at our motel, a cottage called the Pol and Pen, Chris turned into a one-man episode of Emeril, making a fire in the fireplace, uncorking bottles of Tasmanian wine, and serving freshly shucked oysters and a locally made Brie warmed in the kitchenette's oven as appetizers. He then whirred around, making a salad (from locally farmed greens) and broiling the bastard trumpeter. Dorothy and Alexis snuggled on the couch in front of the fire.
“Wow, I've only got three days left,” Dorothy said sadly.
“I'll miss you, paddypussums,” said Alexis.
This was too public a display of affection for us. While gulping down the small, briny oysters, we shared some more information about penguins.
“What's interesting is that these penguins have a lot of different common names. They've been called fairy penguins. Blue penguins. Little blue penguins. But whoever arbitrates these things in ornithological circles finally settled on just little penguins a few years ago.”
We felt a distinct lack of interest. “Sometimes the penguins wear sweaters,” we added.
“Yeah?” Alexis said. “I thought they wore tuxedos.”
We explained that there were sometimes nasty oil spills in the Bass Strait. It's a fairly heavily trafficked shipping zone. When a penguin swims into a slick and gets covered with oil, it can die of cold because the natural oils insulating its feathers are destroyed. Plus, if it starts preening itself, it can die from ingesting the petroleum. So what rescuers often do is pop oil-slicked penguins into tight-fitting wool sweaters. That keeps them warm and prevents them from preening until the oil dissolves or can be washed off. When they wear the sweaters, the penguins look like swanky 1960s ski bums.
After a big oil spill in 2000 an environmental group, the Tasmanian Conservation Trust, put out a call asking people to make penguin sweaters in preparation for the next disaster. They made available a knitting pattern that was published in craft magazines and promulgated on the Internet. And knitters around the world went nuts. Although the pattern was specific to size (the sweaters were nine inches long and four inches wide) and the location of holes for head and flippers, knitters could use whatever colors and designs they wanted. In all, the trust received fifteen thousand wool sweaters before they had to beg the knitting world to put down its needles. The sweaters came in every color from basic black to shocking pink. Some contributors even knitted designs into the wool, such as bowties around the neckline (formal wear) and the emblems of soccer teams across the chest. One knitting circle sent in penguin-size jerseys representing the colors and captains of each of the fourteen Australian-rules football teams.
Alexis wasn't charmed. “It's another case of survival of the cutest,” he said.
He began rummaging among the supplies in the kitchenette, looking for something to eat for dessert. He came up with a chunk of Cadbury Dairy Milk bar and squeezed a layer of evaporated milk on top of a few squares. Then, still not satisfied, he took a spoon and plopped on a dollop of Tasmanian-made raspberry jam.
“Want one?” he said, holding out his goopy concoction.
“You know,” we offered, “you don't have to come out to see the pen-guins—if you don't feel like it.”
“No, no. Let's all stay together.”
A minivan picked us up and drove us to the edge of the Nut. From there, we walked up the lower slope to the penguin rookery. Other visitors were silently filing down the trail in the dark, following guides who held flashlights covered with red filters. Our guide explained that the penguins were sensitive to bright light. In fact, white light and flash photography can temporarily blind them.
Although we couldn't see the burrows in the dark, they were currently occupied by five-week-old baby penguins. The parent penguins spent their days fishing in the Bass Strait and came back at nightfall to feed the chicks. Our visit was timed to coincide with their return. As we walked up the rocky trail, we heard the muffled sound of the Bass Strait washing against the beach below us and the tremulous cries of young penguins urging their parents to come in from the sea.
Our group paused to allow penguin watchers who had arrived earlier to go down. While standing beside the trail, we looked to our right. Just three feet from our boots was a small fluffy penguin. We could have accidentally stepped on it. The guide turned his red beam on the penguin. “He's waiting for his mother,” he said.
In the weird red light, the young penguin looked like a bowling-ball-sized powder puff. He was hunkered down, lying flat against a sand patch, his thin black beak pointing expectantly toward the sea. Instead of a blue tuxedo, he was wearing a brown-gray down coat. This little penguin had never even been in the water. In a few weeks, the guide told us, he would get his swimming feathers, trading in the coat of down for a slick blue tuxedo—composed of ten thousand waterproof feathers. In his current position, he looked completely defenseless.
“Maybe he should be wearing a sweater,” Chris whispered.
As we continued along the trail, we looked down the slope toward the sea and heard the parent penguins calling huack, huack as they prepared to come ashore. In the weak red light, we saw the dim forms of several foot-tall penguins slowly waddling up the rocky slope. They walked stooped forward slightly, their short flippers hanging by their sides. They reminded us of suburban commuters, straggling off their train after a late trip home and intoning, “What a day.” Two fluffy juveniles came down to meet their parent—we weren't sure if it was the mother or the father— and the adult penguin began to regurgitate fish into their beaks. We detected the scent of anchovies.
Coming out of the sea like this is dangerous for little penguins, which is why they do it under cover of darkness. Onshore predators included sea eagles, Tasmanian devils, and introduced species like dogs and feral cats. “They're really much more comfortable in the water,” said our guide. “Their scientific name is Eudyptula minor, which means good little diver.” In fact, little penguins can spend weeks on the water without coming onto land. Having traded in their wings for flippers, they can “fly” underwater, diving to depths of 150 feet. They can even float while they sleep. And they actually sleep for only around four minutes at a time— they're big on quickie naps called micro-sleeps.
While they face sea predators like sharks and seals, their tuxedos provide ocean camouflage. When seen from above, their blue backs blend in with the color of the sea. When seen from below, their white bellies look like reflections on the water's surface.
For all the human traffic in this rookery, it was a small-time operation compared to other pengui
n tourism spots in Australia. There are approximately one million little penguins living along the coast and on islands in and around southern Australia and New Zealand, though their numbers have been cut nearly in half due to beachfront development. The biggest “Penguin Parade” is on the northern side of the Bass Strait at Phillip Island, about eighty miles from Melbourne. Phillip Island has five thousand penguins in its rookery and draws half a million tourists every year. The term “Penguin Parade” was even trademarked. That left us wondering what to call the Stanley penguin waddle. We drew up a short list of possibilities. Penguin Promenade. Penguin Perambulation. Penguin Pilgrimage. Penguin Pomp and Circumstance. Penguin Posse. Fairy Brigade. Fishy Feast of the Fairies.
None of them had the same ring.
“How about dinner bell for puss-'ems?” Alexis offered.
We began to feel that Alexis's position on penguins was parochial.
Up ahead, the guide had stopped and everyone in our group bunched up around him. He was shining his red beam onto the trail just ahead. A mother penguin had plopped herself down in the middle of the trail. She looked exhausted. In fact, she was probably taking a micro-snooze. “She's done in,” the guide said. “We'll have to turn round.”
“Can't we move her?” one of the tour participants asked.
The guide was shocked. “This is their place,” he said.
Alexis took on the role of the penguin. “Go away,” he said in a high timorous voice. “You're scaring me. I don't like you.” Then he giggled.
We went back down the way we came. Perhaps as a form of consolation, our guide told us a little about the penguins' sex lives. “A few weeks ago during the breeding season, things got pretty noisy up here. You should hear the sounds they make calling to their mates.” He made it sound like some kind of orgy.
“Ozzie and Harriet go wild,” said Alexis.
On first glance, the little penguins seem to be the epitome of family life. Males and females “mate for life”—with a relatively low divorce rate of 18 percent, according to penguin researchers. (Not bad compared to a human divorce rate of 50 percent in the United States and 40 percent in Australia.) Husband and wife little penguins raise their young together, sharing the duties of sitting on eggs, watching young chicks, and feeding older juveniles.
But a closer look reveals a looser lifestyle. Partners frequently cheat— sometimes mating with four different birds in one night! Husbands do attempt to keep their wives from consorting with other males—but they're so easily distracted by their own infidelities that they have trouble successfully guarding their territory. Their cries during breeding season are sometimes described as wails, and the sound of all the nighttime calling in the rookery is thought to stimulate sexual activity.
Alexis seemed to be taking on a renewed interest. “Maybe someone should knit them some lingerie.”
“Survival of the sexiest?” we suggested.
“You got it, baby.”
The tour was officially over. Alexis, Dorothy, and Chris decided to walk back to the Pol and Pen, while we lingered at the bottom of the trail. Before the guide took off, we asked him whether Tasmanian tigers had ever preyed on little penguins.
“Maybe they still do,” he said cryptically. Then he smiled and walked away.
With the shadowy hulk of the Nut looming above us, we envisioned a striped quadruped slinking down the beach with a blue-tuxedoed bird in its mouth. Anchovy ? fairy penguin ? Tasmanian tiger. It was an exotic food chain.
15. LISTENING FOR TIGERS
Tasmania's not very big, 177 miles from top to bottom, and 188 miles across at its widest. Some people told us we could drive across the island in a day and see everything there was to see in a weekend—but it just wasn't true. There are so many areas where roads, even trails, don't penetrate, so many folds in the landscape—forming countless hills and valleys. There's always something new to be found over the next ridge.
We looked at the map of Tasmania that James Malley had given us. The place-names provided a snapshot of the early-settlement era and were by turns quaint, romantic, and bizarre. Some were achingly British: Queenstown, Stonehenge, Northumbria Hill. Others were English spellings of aboriginal words—Marrawah (eucalyptus tree), Maydena (shadow), and Corinna (tiger). Some names described landforms or a place's most prominent flora or fauna—these included Frenchman's Cap (a high peak), Whale Head (a coastal point), Reedy Marsh and Rushy Lagoon (both townships), Black River (where James Malley lived), Opossum Bay, and the Tiger Range. And still others were testimony to the land's remoteness and the hard life of the first surveyors and settlers: Misery Plateau, Desolation River, Lake Repulse.
There was no name to describe the spot we had marked with an X, the place where James had heard a Tasmanian tiger calling when he was thirteen. It was in the middle of the South Arthur Forests on the edge of the meandering blue line that stood in for the Arthur River.
We decided to take James's advice. Find a high ridge in good tiger habitat on the south side of the river. Head up there at night and listen.
“Alexis, would you be up for a little tiger hunting tonight?” We were eating a breakfast of scones and clotted cream at the Stranded Whale. The claws of Astacopsis gouldi loomed up behind us.
He glanced at the claws. “Sure,” he said. “Who knows what may lurk in the heart of the Tasmanian bush.”
The area we had chosen for our tiger vigil was the Milkshakes Hills, a 690-acre forest reserve on a vast swath of land managed by Tasmania's forest service. It was on the south side of the Arthur, about eight miles upstream from where James had heard the tiger's call. The nearest town was Trowutta, the place where James grew up, ten miles north via the road. South of the Milkshakes, there were no roads at all. The nearest town was twenty-five miles away at Savage River.
As we drove south from the coast toward the Milkshakes, much of the road was unsealed. The day was hot and clear. The only clouds around were the dust storms kicked up by our speeding cars. Since we were following Chris, any scenery—dry pastureland, rain forest, and logging trucks—was obscured by a dirty brown scrim.
We stopped only once, pulling onto the gravel just past a wooden sign that read “Kanunnah Bridge—Arthur River.” Kanunnah was one of the aboriginal names for the tiger. Below the bridge, the Arthur was surrounded by green temperate rain forest. Trees blanketed a sandbar in the middle of the river. A flock of white cockatoos flew over the treetops. Gazing at the dense forest, we began to appreciate the possibilities for concealment. It looked primordial enough to harbor an assortment of dinosaurs, not to mention a widely scattered population of dog-sized nocturnal predators. Maybe James hadn't just been hearing things.
When we arrived at the campsite, we pitched our tents under a pair of giant tree ferns, using some of the shed fronds to pad the ground. The facilities included a barbecue, a decent supply of wood, and a water tap marked “Not for Drinking.” In the outhouse—which Australians called a dunny—there was a logbook in which visitors could write their thoughts about their visit. Most of the entries were pretty bland: “Beautiful drive!” or “Thanks for the dunny.” But as we read further, we realized the little notebook was rife with references to snakes. “Another snake in the dunny,” someone had written, accompanied by a squiggly drawing of a tiger snake. Since we had yet to see a tiger snake, we spent a fair amount of time holding our noses and peering down the hole of the pit toilet with our flashlights.
Much to our disappointment, the search of the outhouse came up empty. When we returned to camp, we saw Alexis crouched down next to his tent. We assumed he was doing some sort of butt-firming exercise, but then noticed that standing just a few feet away was a gray-furred pademelon—a very scraggly-looking one. We had seen dozens of these two-foot-tall wild kangaroos while spotlighting at Geoff's, but this was the first live pademelon we had seen in the daytime. They were supposed to be nocturnal.
Alexis was extending his arm to offer the pademelon a bit of bread and instructing Dorothy about the b
est method of photographing them in a moment of interspecies communion. “Wait a sec,” he was saying. “Let's try to get …the money shot.”
“That pademelon looks like it has mange.”
Alexis ignored us. “Come on, Mangy, pose with Daddy,” he cooed.
We had heard about macropods like this one. Hanging around campsites and getting sick on junk food. “You know, feeding processed food to kangaroos can give them a disease called lumpy jaw,” we said.
Alexis didn't respond.
“It's an infection of the mouth. It's fatal.”
Alexis withdrew the bread. “Sorry,” he said to the pademelon.
With the offer of a snack rescinded, Mangy loped on all fours over to where Chris was cutting up strips of meat for the grill. Chris shooed him away, and Mangy sniffed hopefully at a locked garbage receptacle before retreating to the perimeter of the campsite. There he sat by the trunk of a eucalyptus tree, looking at us with brown, dewdrop eyes.
We cracked open one of our books, Tasmanian Wild Life, written in 1962 by the Tasmanian naturalist Michael Sharland. And we looked up his description of the pademelon:
Indeed, in neither its broad outline nor in its countenance is there anything distinctive or very pleasing. Its fur never seems to be well groomed or nicely combed, or sleek, or of a pleasing colour. The creature is more like a large untidy rat, the least presentable of the animals that comprise the kindred of the kangaroo.… The one good thing that may be said about it isthat its flesh is the most delectable of that of any form of kangaroo.
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