Carnivorous Nights (35 page)

While watching the platypus repeatedly dive and blow bubbles in the Meander, we discussed how this amazing egg-laying mammal was ultimately placed by scientists within the unromantically named classification of monotreme.

There are three classifications of mammals in the world: placentals, marsupials, and monotremes. Placental mammals (like us humans, dogs, cats, rabbits, and lions) are named after the nurturing organ that surrounds the fetus. (We placentals are also called eutherian, which translates as “well-formed beast.”) Marsupials (kangaroos, thylacines, devils) are named after
marsupium—
the Latin word for pouch, which sounds nice
and comfy. But monotremes (just the platypus and echidna) are named for their “one hole” (
mono
= one,
treme
= hole). This was, Alexis noted, “a massive failure in public relations.”

“Someone should promote the platypus's venomous character,” he suggested. We didn't think platypuses needed too much more publicity, but it was true that this was an attribute that was not commonly known.

Male platypuses have inch-long retractable spurs on their hind legs (on the inner side of their heels) that are remarkably similar in structure to the fangs of a pit viper. From these curving, hollow spurs, they can—when bothered—inject a powerful cocktail of poisons, four of which are not known to occur anywhere else in nature.

Scientists are unclear when male platypuses use their spurs in the wild—possibly against rival males during mating season. But male platypuses have been known to spur people who pick them up, most commonly platypus researchers. Platypus venom causes pain that is said to be exquisite. No known painkiller can lessen it or make it more bearable. Even giving morphine to victims has no effect, and the venom from a single platypus spur can paralyze a limb for weeks.

“What if you picked one up and it spurred you in the balls?” Alexis said. “That would be the ultimate blunder Down Under.”

Maybe for “publicity” purposes, the platypus would be better off focusing on another of its little-known attributes. The platypus's bill conceals an amazing ability—and despite appearances, it is nothing like a duck's. A duckbill is hard, stiff, and inflexible. It's made of keratin, the same substance in fingernails. But a platypus's bill is pliable, covered with skin, and filled with nerve endings that can sense electrical impulses. Strip away the outer layers and the skeleton of a platypus bill looks like a divining rod—and that's exactly what it is. The platypus has a sixth sense.

When a platypus dives underwater, it closes its eyes, nostrils, and ears, and turns on its electro-sense. Sixty thousand receptors in the platypus's bill pinpoint minute electrical signals given off by prey—crayfish, mollusks, tadpoles, and aquatic insect larvae. Using this ability, a platypus spends up to thirteen hours a day foraging, diving as often as eighty times an hour, and capturing and eating half its own weight every single day.

Alexis bent down and put some mud from the Meander's bank in a plastic bag. Then the three of us walked out onto a dock. Another platypus surfaced near a lily pad, sending off ripples that shimmered in the last
purplish light of the sunset. Alexis took out his digital camera and attempted to take some photographs, but the platypus kept most of its body underwater. We tried to imagine the scene beneath the surface. With its webbed feet and paddle tail, the platypus must have looked marvelous scooting through the Meander, diving down, probing the dark water for its dinner.

We went back to the hotel and Alexis put a big Y for yes on the platypus page of his field guide to Tasmanian mammals. Then he held up his bag of river mud, and began extolling the virtues of Tasmania's wildlife.

“This is my idea,” he said. “The wildlife of this island, as diverse as it is, is almost polite. The mainland has the vulgar, harsh, dangerous wildlife. Everything here is nice and furry, not too camouflaged. It reminds me of Beatrix Potter. It has a very Victorian persona, except every-thing's upside down. One of their major crops is opium poppies. Things just don't quite fit. The giant lobster, the Tasmanian devil, the burrowing crayfish. What the hell is
that?
The platypus? Come on. The fauna is surrealistic. It's almost inspiring enough to make me an artist.”

That was an interesting thought, considering he
was
the expedition artist, and so far, we had noticed, inspiration had yet to strike—though he did have a growing collection of materials for making pigment, including wombat scat, two types of river mud, ocher, charcoal, and various types of dirt.

“So are you going to draw something with that river mud?” we asked.

“Yeah,” he said, lying down on his sagging bed. “But not tonight. I'm off duty.”

23. QUOLLING ABOUT

T
he next morning we were waiting outside the Deloraine hotel in the Pajero. Alexis was still inside, placing a phone call to Dorothy back in New York. In our peripheral vision, we saw a middle-aged man in green camouflage fatigues and orange wraparound sunglasses wan dering up Deloraine's main street. We didn't pay too much attention until he pressed his nose against the driver's side window.

“Uh, yes?” We reluctantly rolled down the window.

“You're waiting for Andrew?” He nodded in a military sort of way.

“Yes …” We were confused. Had the Trowunna Wildlife Park sent someone over to collect us? Darlene had said she wouldn't let us leave the island without speaking to Androo. How had they known where we were staying?

“So,” he said. “We'll all be going over to Jackie's Marsh. Which vehicle should we take?”

This was beginning to feel like a carjacking. We eyed the guy nervously. Was it normal in Deloraine to wear full-body camouflage? “Uh … who's Jackie?”

Suddenly, our interrogator looked at us warily. “Are you waiting for Andrew Ricketts?” he said sharply.

Were we?
What was Androo's last name? Panicking, we strained to remember
…Kelly.
That's it, like the outlaw. We're going to see Androo Kelly. And we weren't waiting for him. We were driving over to see him.

“So what are you here for?” he asked as Alexis emerged from the hotel.

We were so relieved to see Alexis—and to have some backup if neces-sary—that we almost shouted, “Quolls! We're going to see some quolls.”

“Ahh,” he said mysteriously.
“Dasyurus maculatus.”
Then he strolled off down the street.

We told Alexis about the strange grilling. “What do you think his story was? Why did he know the quoll's scientific name?”

Alexis thought about it for a minute. “I think he's Green,” he said finally, “unless there's a whole new level of redneck.”

Half an hour later, we were back at Trowunna and walking through a mob of free-range marsupials, including a large forester kangaroo that blocked our path in front of the zoo's café. We gave it a wide berth.

We found Androo Kelly mucking out an empty wombat enclosure. “Yeah, Darlene said you might be coming,” he said. “It's a bad day. Half my staff is off for this weekend. If you don't mind following me around when I'm doing my chores, we can talk.” He bent down to pick up a chunk of wombat scat with his gloved hand.

“Rulla, can you get me a bucket?” A young boy with blond hair emerged with a water pail. “This is Rulla, my son. He's helping me out today.”

Androo looked to be in his mid-forties. He was rail-thin, with dark hair, a scrappy beard, and intense gray eyes. In addition to rubber gloves, he wore a long-sleeved T-shirt that pictured Tasmanian devils in three different poses. Also, he was on crutches. His left ankle and foot were encased in a fiberglass cast.

“What happened to your leg?” Alexis asked.

“Oh, I took a bad step and landed on a rock. Rushing around as usual.”

Trowunna was a private wildlife park, and it operated on donations, a handful of small grants, and a backbreaking amount of hard work. Although it looked like a folksy petting zoo, appearances could be deceiving. Androo was the world's top expert in the breeding of Tasmanian devils and quolls. “Trowunna is an anomaly,” he said. “This facility is the
only private operation that's a member of the zoo industry proper as far as captive breeding goes. But what makes it important is that it's in situ, in Tasmania.”

Androo hobbled out of the wombat enclosure and hopped toward a small building. The crutches and broken ankle didn't seem to slow him down much. “Rulla, come on, we're going to the kitchen.”

Inside, a worker was grating apples and adding them to growing mounds of shredded roughage. “Peter is preparing food for wombats and pademelons. We give them twenty-seven to twenty-nine different fruits and vegetables. This gives them a variety of tastes. So when they go back to the wild, they'll feed on different food sources. It's much better than a mono-diet.”

“What do you feed the carnivores?”

“I usually feed the quolls a mixture of chicken, rabbit, and wallaby. The devils get whole or partial carcasses.”

Androo crutched into an outdoor Tasmanian devil exhibit. “There are two little devils in here. One got attacked by a dog. The other had denned under a house and the owners trapped it and brought it here.” The devils were young and agile, climbing onto a propped-up log. The toes peeping out of Androo's cast looked like they might make a tasty meal for a young devil. But Androo seemed oblivious as he shunted the devils aside to muck out their pen.

“There's a rural myth that devils are dangerous,” Androo said, observing our wondering look. “Most devils here at Trowunna will let me pick them up, even while they're eating. The devil by nature is a timid animal. They have a very sophisticated confrontation avoidance system. They
are
aggressive around carcasses, and there are some devils you can't pick up. They'll bite you and go,
Rah, rah, bug off, you.
”

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.