Tasmanian Devil (24 page)
During the parliamentary debates the Tasmanian Greens' Peg Putt had pointed this out. In 1997 debate raged over the conservative Federal Government's proposed Regional Forest Agreement (RFA)âwould it protect or destroy Tasmania's old growth forests?âand Putt stated the obvious:
Tourism is booming. Tourism is providing more and more jobs and tourism to Tasmania is promoted very much on the basis of âTasmania our natural State'. Our distinguishing feature in the international market is our wilderness and our beautiful places, our forests and our World Heritage areas, and if the RFA fails to protect that resource for the tourism industry then it will have failed. Only today we have had the announcement about Warner Bros. looking at promoting Tasmania with the Tasmanian devil focusing particularly on environmental protection. That is where a big-jobs future for our native forests lies.
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Warner Bros. appeared to have no particular history of championing distant environmental causes. Why should it stipulate that its cartoon character be linked to âenvironmental issues focusing in part on Tasmania' (to quote Groom)? The Tasmanian GovernmentâWarner Bros. verbal agreement, whatever it had been or not been, evaporated. Perhaps the environmental bar was set too high for the avidly pro-forestry government. Perhaps it wanted no bar at all.
All the visitors at Bronte Chalet leaned forward to see one of the world's most famous marsupials, the Tasmanian devil. His ears were pricked forward and there was almost a teddy-bear-like quality to his face as he moved towards his meal. Suddenly he turned and people reeled back in shock and horror. One whole side of his head was covered in a massive tumour like someone had stuck a slab of raw meat against his face. That was the last time we saw the devil nicknamed Phantom of the Opera alive . . . Mystical shocked me when her head first appeared as her face seemed to leap towards me. I then realised both lower jaws were covered in huge suppurating tumours. Amazingly her body condition was healthy with a big fat tail and she was even lactating and had young deposited in a nest somewhere. She was only three years old.
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hristo Baars is a Dutch wildlife photographer whose portfolio includes striking images of Tasmanian devils. In 1996, near Mount William in the state's far northeast, he chanced to photograph a number of devils with ghastly facial growths. Back in Hobart Baars showed the photographs to Nick Mooney, who was horrified. Facial wounds, scars and abscesses are common in older devils, but Mooney recognised something quite different. Although cancer is a major cause of devil mortality, it's usually internal. In 20 years as a wildlife officer he had never seen such gross external manifestations.
The discovery coincided with anecdotal reports from farmers in the northeast of a drop in devil numbers. Dead sheep and cows lay uneaten in paddocks. Interestingly, this part of the state has always been associated with high concentrations of devils.
Cancer-like facial lumps and lesions were not entirely unknown. In 1984 at Mount William, David Pemberton trapped a devil with an apparent facial tumour, and there was an anecdotal report of a similar condition in the north of the state, in about 1993. After the Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD) issue became public in late 2003, reports began to be received from a few old-timers of tumorous-looking devils back in the 1950s and 1960s in a variety of locations, from Ben Lomond in the east to Lake Pedder in the southwest and Arthur Plains in the northwest. But Eric Guiler, who saw and handled thousands of devils over 50 years throughout the island, never encountered it, and there is no evidence to back the old-timers' stories.
Others who worked extensively with devils in the 1970s and 1980s, without finding any trace of disease, included Bob Green (senior curator at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery) and Leon Hughes of the University of Queensland.
On the other hand, evidence for DFTD may be present in nineteenth-century devil skulls in collections in Berlin, Paris and London studied by Kathryn Medlock, zoology curator at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, while on a Churchill Fellowship in 2004. She observed deformities in some skulls similar to those seen in devils killed by DFTD.
A belief persists that devil populations have significant plague-and-crash phases, with numbers apparently much reduced in the 1860s, early 1900s and 1940s, with each recovery phase taking about 30 years. This requires examination of a possible recurrent disease as an explanation for the phenomenon.
The likelihood of DFTD being a naturally recurring virusâ with, therefore, a ânatural' triggerâincreases if distinct patterns of disease-induced population crashes are established. While there is anecdotal information suggesting periodic declines or crashes, hard evidence is scarce and contradictions are apparent.
In 1850 Louisa Anne Meredith recorded that devils were numerous where she lived on the east coast, 143 being caught by shepherds at Apsley in the course of one winter.
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This is the only known historical reference to a significant catch-effort regime.
There is no complementary data indicating low populations.
Those devils were caught in pitfall traps dug for thylacines for bounty claims. They were also an efficient way to trap devils.
In 1863 John Gould wrote of the devil:
It has now become so scarce in all the cultivated districts, that it is rarely if ever seen there in a state of nature: there are yet, however, large districts in Van Diemen's Land untrodden by man; and such localities, particularly the rock gullies and vast forests on the western side of the island, afford it a secure retreat.
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Gould spent three months in Tasmania, travelling from Port Arthur in the south to George Town in the north, as well as to Recherche Bay. He was an experienced bird and mammal collector, but if he personally saw few devils, which is likely, and used that as the basis of his report, the Meredith report should be judged more empirically sound. Eric Guiler believed that early twentieth-century reports of devil rarity largely repeated Gould's comment without further evaluation of numbers.
Professor Flynn struggled to find devils for research purposes and obtained just one female in 1911. He had not necessarily tried too hard, however, he asked a resident of the northern Hobart suburb of Bridgewater to get him one. It took a few weeks, suggesting scarcity in the Bridgewater area! A year earlier
The Mercury
had reported that âone would have to go a long way from Hobart now to find a Tasmanian devil, as they are even scarcer than the “tiger”'.
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Thylacines were hunted and killed in large numbers over many years and Guiler has compiled accurate bounty records showing consistent annual returns. It is hard data. Yet his own belief of a major disease-induced crash early in the twentieth century may be based on flimsy evidence. He wrote: âSeveral men have stated to me that decline was very rapid and occurred almost simultaneously throughout Tasmania and one grazier stated that all the Dasyures disappeared about 1910, claiming that a disease like distemper killed them'.
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These claims aren't much to go on, but the published paper in which they appeared was subsequently quoted extensively, and there is no other known written record to strengthen the claims.
Clive Lord of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery wrote in 1918 that âit [the devil] is now only met with in the rugged unsettled districts';
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a few years later, he more optimistically stated that âin the rougher sections of the country this species exists in fair numbers and there is every prospect of it remaining an inhabitant of such places for years to come'.
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The suggestion of scarcity where humans lived doesn't imply depressed populations throughout Tasmania, although the words of Gould, Flynn and others were widely accepted. However, in 1924, Herbert Hedley Scott, longtime director of the Queen Victoria Museum, and Clive Lord wrote:
We are aware that certain Zoologists are of the opinion that the species is in danger of extinction, and we will readily admit that it is difficult to secure perfect specimens when required, but that is readily explained by the class of country which the species now occupies.
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Their case was that devils were not rare but difficult to catch without significant effort. It could not have been easy before the advent of lightweight traps, four-wheel drives and extensive road systems. Nonetheless, Guiler later maintained that devils were rare at that time.
In 1946, while searching for thylacines, David Fleay caught nineteen devils in the Jane River area of the west coast. This suggests plenty. Guiler's response was that extensive use of attractive baits might have been expected to have yielded even more, which would have been a true indicator of abundance. (Suggesting rarity, however, it is true that a devil caught on a farm in the 1940s was sent to Launceston's Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery for identification. Equally true is that in 2003 a barred bandicoot was presented to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery as a baby thylacine.)
During the 1960s and 1970s applications for permits to cull devils increased, along with numerous reports to the Parks and Wildlife Service of apparent, though not quantitatively confirmed, increases in devil numbers.
From all of the above it may reasonably be inferred that the devil population is difficult to calculate without systematic trapping. An area seemingly empty of devils may have them in good numbers. Radio tracking studies have revealed devils foraging within 50 metres of a barbecue without having been detected. Devils with radio collars have been tracked to their resting sites under grass sags where they have never been previously detected. Devils denned in thick fern patches can be unsighted from a few paces. Devils tracked at night have walked around the researcher at a distance of less than 3 metres without being seen. David Pemberton's three years of fieldwork, involving many months in an area where over 200 devils lived, yielded only a dozen sightings when on foot.
In the light of this, earlier reports of devil population fluctuations need to be treated with care, as should the notion that a distemper-like or mange-like disease affected dasyures early in the twentieth century. When Professor Flynn was researching devils, at a time when they were supposedly scarce, he wrote of his official duty to research marsupial diseases. In his âReport of Ralston Professor of Biology for the Year ending June 30th 1919', he recorded that, âit is only occasionally that such diseases are brought to me personally'.
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Persecution of the thylacine and the devil reduced their numbers. In the mid-1880s Melbourne author and journalist Howard Willoughby wrote of the devil and tiger that âboth have been so hunted and trapped by the settlers, whose sheep and poultry they killed, as now to be very scarce'.
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Some reports indicated that by the turn of the twentieth century devils were so abundant that they were heavily persecuted. According to Lewis Stevenson, an old-timer who in 1972 was interviewed by environmental activist Bob Brown:
In 1900 there were more devils than rabbits. We caught as many as eight in a pitfall at night. They were trapped and snared and poisoned and got the mange like the tigers, so did wombats. From 1906 onwards they died out. 1914, the drought year, was the worst year for the mange. All their hair fell out and left the black skins bare in the bad ones. Their eyes and eye sight was not affected but it sent badgers [wombats] totally blind.
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The pitfall trap was part of an elaborate trapping system for thylacines. The thylacine bounty provided financial incentive for snarers to increase their efforts, and the devil by-catch was undoubtedly significant. According to
The Mercury
in 1910: âThe ”devil” is a slow, clumsy animal, without the speed or cunning of the “tiger” and is much more easily trapped . . .[it] will walk open-eyed into any trap which contains a bit of strong-smelling meat.'
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