Carnivorous Nights

by Margaret Mittelbach

  Although these two devils had been rescued, a large number of An-droo's devils had been born at Trowunna. The wildlife park had a breeding population of more than thirty devils and he was working to build up the numbers, due to the epidemic striking Tasmania's devil population. Although Androo didn't think the disease would push wild devils to the brink—the species had recovered from epidemics before—he was increasing Trowunna's breeding population just in case.

  Androo and Rulla went into a pen with five young devils. One devil approached Rulla, hissing and baring his fangs. Rulla's leg wasn't much thicker than a wallaby's tail, and we were momentarily alarmed. But Rulla executed a dance step around a water pan to get out of the way. “Aww, that's just Mr. Kim,” Androo said of the bad-tempered devil as if he were referring to a petulant teenager.

  “So,” we asked uneasily, “how did you become so comfortable with wild animals?”

  Androo looked a little wild himself. His hair was tousled and spiky. “Animals were always important to me from a young age,” he said. “I grew up in a beautiful environment on the banks of the Huon River. I have memories of when I was three and seeing a potoroo. They have a gleam in their eye and a little smiley look to them, and I used to talk about potoroos as my friends. No one believed me, because no one else saw them. They thought I was talking about a fairy in the garden.”

  His affinity for wildlife also accounted for the unusual spelling of his name. “About fifteen years ago, I realized there were a lot of other Andrew Kellys about. So, I changed my name to Androo with two o's like the potoroo.

  “Potoroos,” he added, “are everywhere here at Trowunna. We're a sanctuary for these small animals. That's why we're here. Once they cross outside our fence into that next paddock, it's guns and dogs, feral cats and foxes maybe, poison baits. It's war.”

  We asked if he thought the thylacine would have benefited from this sort of sanctuary.

  “I don't think about the thylacine that much,” he said.

  Oh.

  Obviously, things had changed since the wildlife park changed management. Androo wasn't going to launch an expedition to find the thylacine anytime soon. As far as he was concerned, it was extinct. What needed to be kept alive, he said, was the thylacine's story, so that people would learn from its tragic history and more animals wouldn't be pushed to the brink by human activities.

  “I'm concerned that what happened to the thylacine could happen to animals now on the edge. Look at the thylacine's relative, the spottedtailed quoll. This is the world's third-largest carnivorous marsupial after the thylacine and the devil, and there are long-term threats to it. These animals are being pushed more and more from vulnerable to threatened.”

  Quolls are such unknown animals in America that our edition of Webster's didn't even include their name. Androo said that this ignorance extended to Australia. “The problem with quolls is that a lot of Australians wouldn't know the word ‘quoll’ or what a quoll is. They might know the saying ‘quolling about,’ which is like ferreting. But they don't know the animal.”

  We followed Androo to an open-air enclosure fenced off by chicken wire. Inside, there were ferns, tree stumps, branches, and rocks scattered on the ground. A cockatoo squawked from a nearby tree.

  Androo opened the gate to the enclosure, and we saw an unusual creature. Its body was long—about fourteen inches—and its black fur was covered with white spots. “We have two species of quolls in Tasmania, the Eastern and the spotted-tailed. That's an Eastern quoll, black morph.” The quoll's small face tapered sharply to a wet, hairless pink nose. Its body sat low to the ground like a ferret's, and its black tail was long and bristly. As soon as we walked in, the spotted beast dashed away in a blur of motion.

  The Eastern quoll (the fourth-largest carnivorous marsupial in the world) is believed to be extinct on the mainland. The last one documented was run over by a car in a Sydney suburb in 1963. The Eastern quoll had once ranged throughout southeastern Australia, but competition from foxes and feral cats, forest habitat destruction, and poisoning by farmers had written its epitaph. Tasmania was the only place the Eastern quoll survived.

  “Look at its whiskers and sharp little face,” said Androo. Though Eastern quolls occasionally stole food from Tasmanian devils and caught mice, small marsupials, and ground birds, they lived primarily on a diet of insects in the wild.

  In a neighboring enclosure was another Eastern quoll, this one with an orange-brown coat and white polka dots. It sat quietly next to a rock and didn't dash away when Androo approached. “It's blind,” Androo said. “Parks and Wildlife gave me that one. It was hit by a car, but he's doing okay. It's a fawn morph. The majority of Eastern quolls are this color.”

  We looked at the quoll's round perky ears and sightless almond-shaped eyes. Its short legs were covered in white fur.

  Breeding quolls in captivity isn't easy. They only breed once a year, and males and females have to be sequestered soon after mating—because males can become very aggressive. But the process is rewarding. Like devils, Eastern quolls give birth to supernumerary offspring, as many as thirty, although they only have six teats and usually only raise three or four young. Seeing the young ones is a touching experience, Androo said. Quolls are smaller than a grain of rice when they're born and highly undeveloped. Yet, even when they're only a couple of inches in size, still furless and naked, the pouch young already have spots visible on their skin.

  Watching the pouch young grow is heartwarming, too. The Eastern quoll's pouch is small relative to a kangaroo's and after about three months, the young outgrow it and are left in a grassy shelter inside a cave, log, or tree hollow. If the mother needs to change dens, she carries the young on her back. The mother doesn't teach the young to hunt. They do it instinctively, so captive-raised Eastern quolls are not disadvantaged when they're introduced into the wild.

  Androo moved on to another enclosure, where we saw another species of quoll. It was larger and more powerful-looking. “That's the big tiger quoll, also called the spotted-tailed quoll, a female.”

  She had a muscular back and longer legs than the Eastern quoll. In the sun, her fur glinted chocolate brown. White spots ran the length of her body and all the way down her long, bushy, impressive tail. She looked intimidating. Her head was round and hulking and her back was humped like a devil's.

  “Now that's a predator,” said Alexis.

  Spotted-tailed quolls dispatched their prey—possums, birds, rabbits, chickens—by ambushing them and delivering a crushing bite to the back of the head or neck. “Quolls are sequatorial,” said Androo. “That means they are equally adept at hunting in trees and on the ground.”

  “They're rarely seen because they're nocturnal,” he added. “People usually only see their handiwork—getting into a chicken coop and killing every chicken that moves. Similar to what a fox does.” To farmers that made quolls Public Enemy Number 1. And though some farmers livetrapped the quolls and moved them to different locations, or even brought them to Trowunna, many of the barnyard raiders got shot or poisoned. “One year I knew of nineteen spotted-tailed quolls that were killed because they were getting into chicken coops. I'm trying to keep up with the killing. My job's to keep breeding and releasing them. I released thirty-seven quolls last year.”

  The killing was reminiscent of the thylacine bounty. The spotted-tailed quoll population was crashing on the mainland. Once widespread, these quolls now lived in fragmented populations and had become extinct over parts of their original range. Listed as vulnerable by the Australian government and rare in Tasmania, where there was an estimated population of just three to four thousand animals, spotted-tailed quolls were still being treated as pests. The Parks and Wildlife Service had put out a fact sheet on “living with” quolls, with instructions on how to construct quoll-proof poultry coops. In cases where quolls were persistent, the fact sheet stated, “The Parks and Wildlife Service may issue permits to trap troublesome individuals for relocation. Usually these permits are o
nly issued where someone's livelihood is threatened.” The fact sheet went on to say, “Some people do take the law into their own hands and set poisons. However, this is illegal.” Apparently, the law didn't have much teeth to it. To Androo's knowledge, no one had ever been prosecuted for illegally killing a rare quoll.

  We followed Androo into an indoor quoll house. “In here, we have an old male spotted-tailed quoll,” he said. “Devils are old at five. Quolls are old at four.”

  The old quoll was ginger-colored with white spots. He lay on his stomach on top of a branch with his long thick tail hanging down. His body was much larger than the female's—about three feet long compared to her twenty-five inches—and his head was heftier. When Androo changed the quoll's water, he remained on his perch and bared his long, piercing fangs.

  We told Androo about our curious encounter with the man in camouflage and his reeling off of the spotted-tailed quoll's scientific name, Dasyurus maculatus.

  “I know Andrew Ricketts. He's a good guy. Jackie's Marsh is an area where a lot of alternative people live, stalwarts of the conservation move-ment—forest restorers and craftspeople. It's where they want to build the Meander Dam.”

  Ahhhh, this made sense. We had read about the dam project in the local newspapers. The plan was to dam a portion of the Meander River, the river we had seen the platypuses in, so that farmers could irrigate their fields. Environmentalists had been arguing that the dam was a threat to the spotted-tailed quoll, because it would flood 730 acres of the quoll's habitat.

  “We've all been involved in the fight against the Meander Dam,” Androo said. “It would benefit about twenty farmers. But it would flood a stronghold for the quolls. Someone has been poisoning the dam site. They think if they get rid of the quolls then there's no argument about the dam. Ricketts might be trailing the people who are poisoning the quolls.”

  So the camouflaged stranger was on the side of Dasyurus maculatus after all.

  Androo said it was a shame that so few people seemed to appreciate the quoll. “A spotted-tailed quoll is the closest animal we will ever have to a thylacine. They're closely related. The difference is that the quoll is a tree dweller. You hand-rear a little quoll, and there's a stage in the development when you could fool someone into believing it is a thylacine pup. The head structure is identical.”

  In a neighboring enclosure that was filled with foliage, an agile, golden brown spotted-tailed quoll jumped from branch to branch, using its long tail for balance. When it pushed its face up to the glass to get a look at us, we saw its head straight-on and saw the resemblance to the thylacine.

  Androo pointed to the quoll's jaw. “When you look at a quoll's smile line—when they have their jaws closed—they have an extra smirk line. That jawline is what allows them to open their mouths so wide.”

  The quoll had the same sly grin as the thylacine.

  “Do you think you could have bred the thylacine in captivity?” we asked.

  “I believe I could have,” he said. “But it's a bit late for that, isn't it?”

  24. BLOOD AND SLOPS

  We felt almost decadent continuing our tiger search after talking to Androo. But seeing a living creature that so resembled the thylacine fueled us on. There were still thylacine-related people to see, places to go. And there was one spot we were itching to explore: a tiny town called Pyengana in Tasmania's Northeast.

  According to guidebooks, Pyengana had three claims to fame: a gourmet cheese factory, the second-highest waterfall on the island, and a pub with a beer-drinking pig. But we had also quolled out the fact that Pyengana was the location of a much trumpeted tiger sighting. In 1995, a part-time park ranger reported that, while bird-watching there, he had spotted a thylacine through his binoculars. This sighting was widely reported in the media, and because it had been made by a park ranger, we decided it was worth investigating.

  The road to Pyengana proved interesting as well. We had obtained a copy of a report titled “The Tasmanian Tiger—1980” published by the Parks and Wildlife Service. The report analyzed 320 tiger sightings dating from 1936 to 1980 and concluded that the sightings were not randomly distributed. Most tiger sightings weren't near big towns or population centers, but concentrated in areas where the tiger had actually been known to live and that still had good habitat. A large percentage of the sightings were made from vehicles, and one relatively lonely road— the northeast section of the Tasman Highway—had more tiger sightings than any other stretch of pavement. That was the road we were on.

  The author of the report, wildlife officer Steven J. Smith, wrote:

  An exceptionally large proportion of these sightings have occurred on the Tasman Highway in the North East, particularly in the Sideling and Weldborough areas. In these areas the highway passes through wet sclerophyll forest and rainforest which are continuous with extensive forests on each side of the highway, including habitats which, historically, are known to have been used by the thylacine, and where many bounty payments were made.

  Smith concluded that despite the lack of physical evidence that the tiger survived, the clusters of sightings in such pristine habitats gave “some cause for hope.” We wondered, twenty-five years later, if it was still true.

  By noon, we were driving through the Sideling, a mountainous, winding route named for its snakelike curves. Though Smith had specifically mentioned the Sideling as a tiger hot spot, we were having trouble understanding how that could be. In some sections, the terrain was still gorgeous. The narrow road curved like a meandering black stream through wet green forest, and we could imagine a thylacine leaping up a fernblanketed embankment or dashing across an isolated bend. But as we drove further, we were confronted with a stark reality. The habitat was being taken out of this place. From one mountain overlook, we had a panoramic view of the Sideling, and rather than the continuous forests that Smith described, the landscape was riddled with bald spots. The areas, which had been logged, looked like patches of burned skin.

  From another overlook, we saw nothing but foreign trees. Many were familiar as they, like us, came from North America. Instead of wet eucalyptus forest, there were redwoods, ponderosa pines, and Douglas firs. We wondered what the native animals thought of these exotic species.

  A sign erected by Forestry Tasmania read, “Sideling Arboretum … The arboretum was planted to allow forest researchers to determine the best softwoods to grow in Tasmanian plantations. Tasmania's radiata pine industry grew from the experiments conducted in this plot.” Radiata pines were the plantation trees we had seen encroaching on the edge of Todd Walsh's lobster habitat. They were fast-growing, watersucking imports from California and had replaced large swaths of native Tasmanian forests.

  The sign had been defaced multiple times. At the bottom one graffito read, “Invest in old growth FOREST not weeds, ya bastards!” Another scrawl extended the sign's logo so that it read, “Forestry Tasmania DESTROYING OUR FORESTS.”

  We were beginning to wonder what Forestry Tasmania's story was when we rolled into Scottsdale, the area's regional center. There were a few shops and a bank, but most conspicuously there was a stunning, swooping building on the town's edge. It rose like a spaceship out of a browning cow pasture. A sign out front read “Forest EcoCentre.”

  The building was shaped like a truncated cone, flat on the top and leaning to one side. Its curving exterior walls were made of large panes of milky-colored glass set into a thin grid of pale wood.

  Alexis studied it with a critical eye. “On the one hand,” he said, “I'm thinking a UFO in a cornfield. But on the other, it looks like a giant tree stump.”

  We walked inside the building and were confronted with a bizarre forest simulation. A concrete walkway, sparingly lined with ferns and other forest plants, encircled the base of the glass walls. Overhead, an enormous flat-screen monitor aired a tumbling waterfall in the middle of a cool, lush forest. A sign with an arrow directed us to the “Animal Walk,” a dark corridor with color posters of a devil, quoll, and po
toroo interspersed with potted plants. On another video screen, a documentary scored with sentimental music and birdsong extolled the beauty of Eucalyptus regnans, the largest tree species south of the equator.

  Outside, the sun beat down on brown grass. There was hardly a tree in sight—unless you counted the lobbed-off tree ferns that had been transplanted into a bed of wood chips.

  “I don't get it. Is this where the forestry people have their offices?” Alexis said.

  It was. The EcoCentre was actually a building within a building. Forestry Tasmania's offices were hidden from public view in a three-story wooden structure surrounded by the outer glass wall. The EcoCentre was designed to be energy-saving, tilting toward the north to receive maximum sun exposure in winter. During the summer, louvers—controlled by smart-building software—opened and closed to keep the building cool and funnel the warm air back outside. The public space, with its high-tech hardware and software, wrapped around the offices like a doughnut.

  It was a postapocalyptic design. An eco-friendly building erected by the same people who were destroying habitats just down the road. They even had an Orwellian slogan: “Forestry Tasmania: Growing Our Future.”

  Alexis looked like he was going to foam at the mouth.

  “Is this their vision of the future?” he said. “Highly controlled simulations of what Tasmania used to look like? It's like Silent Running.” (In the movie Silent Running, the world's last forests are preserved on a spaceship bio-dome, because they can no longer survive on a ravaged Earth.) Alexis began to peruse the informational sheets scattered around the exhibits. A fact sheet on Tasmania's tall trees explained that Forestry Tasmania protected all trees over eighty-five meters tall (279 feet) and suggested that if visitors wanted to see some of the Northeast's tall trees they should drive to the Evercreech Forest Reserve. The reserve was thirty miles from the EcoCentre as the crow flies and one hundred miles by road.