Carnivorous Nights (29 page)

“These guys are my heroes,” said Alexis, staring down the dark road. “They're on the front lines of the war to protect biodiversity.”

And they were fighting an invisible enemy. We hoped the Red Fog didn't win.

“O
h, there seem to be naked people with us today.” Two elderly women were pointing at Alexis, who lay on a lawn with his shirt off and his shorts hiked up.

We had been invited to the Field Day at the Launceston Field Naturalists Club. It was a combination picnic and flora-and-fauna hunt on the club's grounds in Myrtle Bank, about twenty-five miles northeast of Launceston. The drive over had been hellacious. The outdoor temperature
gauge in the Pajero read 30 degrees Centigrade—which in Fahrenheit translated as “insanely hot.” If we had cracked the egg of a Tasmanian native hen, we could have cooked it on the blacktop. To make things worse, Tasmania was being hit by wildfires—and the air was tinged with the smell of smoke. Several of the club's members were skipping the day's activities in order to protect their homes from the licking flames.

We found the man who had invited us to the event under the shade of a big spreading eucalyptus tree. His name was Jim Nelson, and he was an expatriate American who had been living in Tasmania for the past three decades. Todd Walsh, our escort into the watery world of the giant lobster, had suggested we get in touch with him.

“What's his specialty?” we had asked Todd.

“Ahh … everything. He knows every blade of grass in the bloody bush.”

Jim was tall, sunburned, and rangy. For the last couple of years, he had been doing research on burrowing crayfish. “Todd may study the largest crayfish,” he said in a deep booming voice that sounded remarkably like William Hurt. “But I study one of the world's most highly evolved ones.”

Jim opened the trunk of his car. It held a small library of files containing scientific papers, natural history books, and specimens. He removed a vial containing a crayfish embalmed in alcohol, and we noticed Jim had huge hands. If a crayfish latched its claws on to one of his mitts, he probably wouldn't even feel it.

“This crayfish is actually the one that's on the club's land here and it's an endangered species. It's called
Engaeus orramakunna
, the Mount Arthur burrowing crayfish. It makes its living from burrowing down to the water table rather than living in free water. Consequently, it's changed its morphology to accommodate that sort of burrowing. So when you look at it, it's quite absurdly proportioned. It's got this tiny little tail and this great big bulldozer front end. Its carapace is laterally compressed and its claws are held vertically, so it can squeeze through really tight spaces. It's quite amazing for a water animal to make all these adaptations to live in soil.”

Jim was wearing a black T-shirt with illustrations showing
E. orramakunna
in three different poses. Alexis asked if he could photograph Jim and his crayfish—and an odd sort of fashion shoot unfolded. Jim removed the crayfish from the vial, and they discussed whether the crayfish's
tail should be tucked under its body or stretched out. They settled on tucked under, and Jim modeled with the crayfish in his palm.

“Faaaahbulous,” Alexis said. Click. “So where are you from originally, Jim?”

“The Midwest. I was born in Nebraska, but I did most of my growing up in Illinois on the Fox River, not far from Chicago.”

“Why did you move to Tasmania?” Click. “For the crayfish?”

“Um, well I was escaping Richard Nixon.”

“Post-Watergate depression?” Click.

“Well, Watergate really blew up after I came here. Richard Nixon was a real, you know …I was pretty discouraged with America. Most of my friends that went to Vietnam came back in body bags … so I was looking for something else. I had done a degree in psychology and biology and decided that there really wasn't any future for me there. I got involved in ceramics, and I came to Australia to study with a master potter. When I visited Tasmania, I found the lush green more agreeable than the dry mainland. Then I set up my own pottery in 1973, so I've been doing that ever since.”

Click. “So how did you start studying crayfish?”

“Well, originally with that giant one that Todd is interested in. Growing up, I was always interested in crayfish. There was something about them that fascinated me. Not so much from a scientific point of view but from an aesthetic one—”

“They're gorgeous.” Click.

Jim pointed at the specimen in his palm. “
Engaeus
is the genus of course and
orramakunna
is the aboriginal word for the name of the area. Tasmania's really a hot spot for burrowing crayfish. There's fifteen species of the
Engaeus
and fourteen species of another genus of burrowing crayfish that occur in our buttongrass plains.”

Alexis wrapped up his shoot. We told Jim we had spent the night in a buttongrass plain and had been surprised not to see any animals—not even a crayfish.

“Well, it can be really variable by the night. Was it a full moon? Most animals—little mammals in particular—don't much like moonlit nights. They're too visible to owls. They like at least a half-moon.”

Jim invited us into the club's study center. It was built out of mud bricks and wood. There were bunks, a kitchen, and a small, well-thumbed
library. Many of the books, Jim informed us, had been written by members of the Field Naturalists Club. In fact, as a collective the club had published a book,
A Guide to Flowers and Plants of Tasmania
, now in its third edition, and it was the bible to the island's flora. They had used the proceeds to build this clubhouse.

The club's official emblem was an illustration of a Tasmanian tiger perched on a rock overlooking a valley. The emblem was pictured on name tags pinned to club members' shirts and burned into the wood of a long table in the middle of the clubhouse. It was a regal-looking thylacine. With its head lifted nobly, it was the kind of heroic figure that inspired optimism. We wondered if any of these naturalists thought the tiger was still alive.

We asked Jim what he thought about the thylacine.

“I don't think it's out there anymore.” Our hopes sank again. Jim thought the thylacine's large size and the fact that there hadn't been a body found or a photograph taken in nearly seventy years made its survival highly unlikely. “The kind of sightings that people make …well, people see something and they want to see something else. So I don't trust all the sightings. Having said that, there have been a couple of really good ones. And there's a zoologist, who's long retired by now—Bob Green—he's still of the opinion that they're out there somewhere.”

While the field naturalists ate lunch and chatted, we wandered around eavesdropping, hoping to overhear some sagacious conversation about the tiger. There were experts on everything else: orchids (“there are more than 190 orchid species in Tasmania, including 50 that are endemic”), eucalyptus trees (“twenty-nine species in Tasmania, seventeen of which are endemic”). There were people who had millipedes and worms named after them. When a brown spider the size of a baseball peeped out from behind the clubhouse's rafters, it was welcomed like an old friend dropping by for tea. “That's a huntsman,” a club member informed us.

We met a chipper woman wearing a crisp red-and-white-striped Oxford shirt, with short gray hair. Her name was Alison Green (no relation to Bob), and she had been the curator of invertebrates at the Tasmanian Museum for twenty-three years.

“What's your specialty?” we asked.

“Slaters.”

“Oh …” We weren't
quite
sure what those were.

“Native slaters, not the ones that are introduced.”

“Hmmm … how many species are there?”

“I think we're up to about sixty-odd species for Tasmania, about half of those have been described and named and the other half are still new and waiting to be described and named.”

“Where can you find them?”

“They occur in all sorts of territories—in rain forest, in eucalypt forests, on beaches, and in caves. We've got three species introduced from Europe which are in everybody's gardens.”

“What are those called?”

She supplied us with three obscure scientific names.

“Do you have a favorite?”

“Not really. I've got one which I named after my professor. It lives in the rain forest. It's quite an attractive little beast. It rolls up.”

We motioned for Alexis to come over. “Alexis, meet Alison, she's a slater expert.”

“That's amazing. Do you think we'll see any slaters today?”

“I certainly hope so.” She excused herself and said she would see us on the nature trail.

“Alexis, what are slaters?” we whispered.

“I have no fucking clue.”

Next we met a young man named Danny Soccol. He was about thirty, a recent graduate of the biology program at the University of Tasmania in Launceston.

Danny had special interests in botany and bush tucker, and he sometimes volunteered to collect invertebrates—spiders, worms—for scientific projects. He actually had a worm named after him,
Diporochaete soccoli.
“I was one of the people who helped with the research. I was digging them out all over Tassie, in rain forests, dry sclerophyll. But it's just a small native worm.” He laughed self-effacingly.

“Don't be embarrassed,” said Alexis. “We're jealous.”

The field naturalists were going exploring on the land surrounding their clubhouse, 150 acres of rain forest, wet and dry eucalypt forest, and open grassland. We followed them down a path of trees neatly labeled with
signs. Alison pointed out a
Eucalyptus regnans.
We strained our necks looking up the gray-and-brown trunk and halfway up were hit with vertigo.
Eucalyptus regnans—
more commonly known as a swamp gum— is the largest species of tree in the Southern Hemisphere.

Danny and Jim stopped in front of another specimen, a green bushy shrub with long, leathery, bladelike leaves.

“This is a Tasmanian sugar bush,” Jim said.

“Is that an endemic?”

“Yes, it only grows here.”

He and Danny tore off a few leaves.

“If you chew them, they taste sweet. It's excellent bush tucker.”

We put the leaves in our mouths and gave them a chew. At first, they didn't taste like anything.

“You have to work on it a little bit. It takes a while for the sugar to come out.”

We continued chewing. After a moment, the leaves transmitted a slight tingling sensation.

“Mmmm,” Alexis said tentatively. The club members looked at us expectantly.

Slowly, we perceived a fiery wave breaking over the soft parts of our mouths. Our gums and cheeks began to burn. Our tongues went numb.

As the green wildfire engulfed our lips, we spit out the leaves and looked at the “sugar bush.” There had been a little label in front of the plant all the time. It said “Tasmanian mountain pepper.”

“It really has a nice bite,” Jim said, laughing.

“And it's very good on pepper steak,” Danny added.

We'd been punked! And by a bunch of botanizers. Who knew flower lovers engaged in hazing?

Danny stopped in front of another plant. We looked at it warily.

“Is this another type of bush tucker?”

“No, it's stinkwood …I'm giving this one away.”

He crushed a few leaves. We took the tiniest of whiffs and were slammed with a wave of nausea.

We had just become honorary members of the club.

We walked down through eucalyptus forest and into a damp, muddy gully with a small stream running through it. In this lush environment, prehistoric tree ferns grew like vertical gardens, their trunks covered in flowering plants, mosses, liverworts, and smaller species of ferns. John
Simmons, the club's president, pointed up at a tree fern whose base was growing from the branch of a sassafras tree about thirty feet up. He explained that the sassafras tree might have originally grown on the tree fern, but over the years, the tree put down roots and lifted the fern into the air.

Some of the tree ferns' moss-covered trunks had bizarrely contorted shapes. One was bent like a snake poised to strike; half of its trunk lay on the ground before it swooped upward. “They'll fall or be knocked over and start growing again. You can even chop a man fern off in the middle and it will reroot or sprout,” John told us, “which is why some of them are so twisty.”

Tree ferns, commonly called man ferns in Tasmania, are long-lived and very slow to develop, growing only two inches in height each year. John believed that several of the tree ferns in the gully were upwards of six hundred years old.

These tree ferns,
Dicksonia antarctica
, were ancient, possibly existing as a species for as long as 90 million years. And they were all over Tasmania. Yet, in the last ten years, their future had become less secure. Overseas, the tree ferns had become popular garden plants—worth $400 per yard, a height not achieved until a tree fern was thirty or forty years old— and there was an astonishing amount of poaching, with many of the stolen ferns ending up in English gardens.