Tasmanian Devil (4 page)

During one week in 1909, some 30 sightings of the Jersey Devil caused near-panic. The Smithsonian Institution speculated that it might be a Jurassic survivor, possibly a pterodactyl or peleosaurus which had survived in the region's limestone caves. More plausible, if that is the word, was that ‘New York scientists thought it to be a marsupial carnivore'.
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But confusion arising out of words and myth pales beside reality on the ground. Tasmanian devils have been mercilessly persecuted. Nineteenth-century bounty hunting gave way to widespread strychnine poisoning in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, with baits laid by farmers and also by trappers who made a living from possum and wallaby pelts. Snaring was a substantial business; in the 1923 season, for instance, 693 147 possums were snared and about half that number of wallabies.
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Yet spotted-tailed quolls probably damaged more snared animals than devils did, because they had a greater ability to reach a carcass suspended above the ground.

Likewise poorly attached chicken wire won't protect poultry from hungry devils, but their disappearance from many rural areas has not meant that hens are now safe. Max Cameron, the owner of ‘Kingston', bought twelve hens for a new property near Trowunna and put them in a sealed room overnight. A quoll got into the room through a drain and ‘necked'—killed and blood-sucked— all of them.
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Yet the Tasmanian devil has been an easy target for so long that, like the ethereal Jersey Devil flying through the mists of its densely wooded swamps, truth and reality are secondary to established myth.

Devils can stink—if they have been in a trap or cage for an extended period and their coats become matted with excrement. Adults have a naturally musty, waxy odour, but young devils are as clean-smelling as puppies and kittens. The perception that the animals stink because they eat rotting meat is incorrect, and reflects a lack of first-hand experience.

Their famed jaw strength is very real—the equivalent of that of a dog four times their size, or, for their body mass, more powerful than a tiger's. The earliest steel wire traps used by Guiler proved useless, since some adult devils were able to chew their way through the thick wire. When trapping devils in the 1950s naturalist David Fleay was astounded to find a devil wearing a glistening yellow metal ‘collar', until he recalled that two weeks previously a special composite foot-snare of brass wire and hemp set for a thylacine had been found sprung and bitten off.
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Even so, devils are incapable of chewing through the biggest bones of large animals. And tough hide is very difficult to chew and ingest. Thus while wombat flesh and the prized fat is devoured, devils generally leave the backbone and adjoining skin of these rugged herbivores.

The devil's range of vocalisations is truly impressive. There are at least eleven distinct vocalisations, but describing them isn't easy. Writing in 1806, Harris described ‘a sudden kind of snorting'.
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One hundred and fifty years later Fleay heard that sound as ‘wheezing coughs that sounded harshly like “Horace”',
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while for the excitable
Reminiscences From the Melbourne Zoo
correspondent:

If one could imagine a choir consisting of imps in the infernal regions, with every ear-splitting, brain-scratching sound grouped in hideous discords, the only earthly model that could be used as a guide would be a chorus from a company of Tasmanian devils.
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According to German conservationist Bernhard Grzimek:

The Tasmanian devil which lived with us at Frankfurt Zoo for a number of years used to sing loudly and persistently when encouraged to. When cleaning out its cage, all we had to do was to stand in front of it and give the right note, and the animal would open its mouth and join in, keeping up the performance for quite a while. (I had earlier managed to get my wolves to sing in the same way.)
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Director of the Frankfurt Zoo, Grzimek devoted himself to wildlife conservation, particularly in Tanzania, and his influential 1959 documentary
Serengeti Shall Not Die
won an Oscar award. Eric Guiler also ‘sang' with a number of the devils he kept at the University of Tasmania.

Mary Roberts owned Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart early in the twentieth century. She particularly loved devils and developed a close relationship with them; they eagerly responded to her calls.

It is not a myth that devils like water. Captive devils regularly splash around in their water pools and clearly enjoy it. On his trapping expedition Fleay witnessed a not uncommon sight: ‘Another huge fellow . . . glared balefully from behind a shut [trap] door one morning and when I turned him loose he rushed for the river bank, dived into the icy current and swam strongly to the opposite side disappearing among the ferns'.
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Nick Mooney has seen a devil swim powerfully across the fast-flowing, 50-metre wide Arthur River.

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.'
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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,
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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 . . .'
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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.
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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.