Carnivorous Nights (36 page)

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 only 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?”

W
e 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:

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 potoroo 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.