Thylacine (26 page)

Nick Mooney, wildlife management officer with Tasmania's Parks and Wildlife Service and a longtime thylacine searcher and researcher, believes that the biotechnology of cloning should be used first on seriously endangered species. But he cautions against cloning as a panacea: ‘A snappy, technological quick-fix such as cloning extinct animals tempts many from the slog of fundamental environmental conservation'.
¹⁴

There is also the ethical debate. Should scientists play God? Human beings caused the thylacine's extinction and shouldn't we have to live with that? At another level, there is the fundamental dilemma of ‘copyright' over cloned specimens. Would they belong to the New South Wales Government? Archer's response as to whether steps have been taken to acquire copyright ownership is: ‘Nothing yet. But somewhere down the line we've got to start looking at this sort of thing I suppose. We'll be taking sensible legal advice but my inclination has always been to keep the project and its potential benefits in the public sector'.
¹⁵

In this way the thylacine's future history may bear a ghostly resemblance to its mystery-shrouded past. The certainty of its short, brutal interaction with European settlers and their Tasmanian descendants may, according to the website of the Australian Museum, ‘simply be a 70-year hiccup'.
¹⁶
That is not a sentiment likely to meet with universal approval. In the words of conservation biologist David Pemberton: ‘We don't know the animal's social behaviour so how are we going to recreate it ethically? Or are we just going to make something that behaves another way and call it a tiger? It won't be. It will be
Thylacinus
archerite
'.
¹⁷

15 SIGHTINGS
AND THE
SCIENCE OF
SURVIVAL

I remembered how docile they seemed in captivity. It stood about twenty inches in height, with a heavy body and powerful looking jaws. The colouring was tawny, similar to the lion with dark brown stripes running from back to sides. It seems unlikely that there are any tigers left in Tasmania, but if any are found I trust they will be left in their natural habitat.

M
RS
M
YRA
D
RANSFIELD,
R
OKEBY

‘I
t was embellished precisely because it could not yet be disproved.' Daniel J. Boorstin, US historian and Librarian of Congress during the 1970s, wrote those words in reference not to the Tasmanian tiger but to its entire habitat,
Terra Australis
Incognita
, the southern land not yet discovered.
¹
It was the fabled land that grew and shrank and grew again as maps changed across the centuries, until the day Abel Tasman, Ide Tjercxzoon and their shipmates dropped anchor.

Boorstin's statement is just as applicable to the thylacine, about which the big question, perhaps the only question left, is: could it still be out there? Any number of Australians are convinced that it is; any number that it isn't.

If the thylacine still exists it will be miraculous, because there has been virtually no scientifically recognised physical evidence to support the case for its presence for two-thirds of a century. Yet not only are there numerous instances of supposedly extinct species coming back—proof that science can be wrong— there have also been thousands of documented sightings of ‘it': in Tasmania, across mainland Australia and New Guinea. Either many people are wrong almost all of the time, or the thylacine is alive and well but in sufficiently low numbers, and sufficiently remote locations, to have avoided detection (a possibility, or even a probability, that might continue indefinitely).

To muddy the waters further, devil sightings continue to be reported in southern Australia and there is potential nineteenth-century evidence of thylacine activity in both South Australia, suggested by Paddle, and the Kimberley region, suggested by Guiler and Godard.

Documented sightings excite the optimist in us, but need to stand up to rigorous testing to be considered viable. They also need to be weighed against current scientific opinion as to the likelihood of remnant populations still being out there. While the case against the thylacine's continued existence may appear overwhelming, there remain some compelling reasons to hold off on that final judgement. They constitute the last piece in the thylacine puzzle—but it is a very big piece.

In 1980, Tasmanian Parks & Wildlife Service zoologist Steven J. Smith published a detailed report on the status of the thylacine at that point. Included in his report was an analysis of every reported sighting from 1936 to the year of publication: 320 in all. That averages out at about one per month across a 24-year period, but the actual incidence was very different.

A sample page from the Steven Smith's ‘Sightings Report'. Criteria in use today are
considerably more stringent. Nick Mooney's current rating method (adapted for fox
sightings) derives in part from discussions with psychologists and police and includes
such details as chest flash, ear posture, leg length and the animal's motion, if the sighter
had a good view. But Mooney's reconstructions of thylacine and fox sightings have led
him to conclude that the error in sighting time, for instance, is usually 400%, meaning
that if someone said they saw the animal for ten seconds it was probably two or three
seconds.
(
The Tasmanian Tiger—1980: A Report on an Investigation of the Current
Status of the Thylacine,
Thylacinus cynocephalus, by S. J. Smith, Hobart, Parks and Wildlife Service, 1981; Nick Mooney)

Sightings increased decade by decade, gradually then dramatically, from just 21 in the 1940s to 125 in the 1970s.

Smith's report is important because there is no doubt that the very last of the species did
not
die in Beaumaris Zoo on 7 September 1936. Conservation biologists and other experts are in general agreement that the thylacine existed at least into the immediate post-World War II period—the time of fewest sightings, ironically when they were well under legislative protection. The presently unanswerable question is whether those remnant groups had reached the point of functional extinction, when a species is so rare as to no longer be influencing the ecology through selection, competition, predation, parasite spread and so on. Increased sightings suggested otherwise: but how believable were they? Each one went through many hoops before being given a final rating.

The parameters of the Smith survey seemed reasonably unambiguous:

The sightings considered in this report are by people who claim that they saw, or may have seen a thylacine; or who saw an animal that they could not identify but whose description suggests that it may have been a thylacine. To be included in this sample the descriptions supplied by observers needed to be sufficient to identify a thylacine-like animal under the circumstances of the sighting . . . the criteria used to rate reports being the description of the animal, the observer's credibility and experience with native fauna, the circumstances of the sighting . . . and correlation with other sighting reports and previous thylacine distribution.
²

However, thanks to human nature, the task would never be as simple as that:

It is evident that the reporting of sightings is directly related to publicity given to searching for thylacines [and yet] many people are reluctant to make reports, for a variety of reasons, and it is known that a large number of sightings remain unrecorded. Some people fear that as a result of a report the location may be publicised and the animal endangered. Others fear that changes to the tenure and management of the locality [resulting from a good sighting] could threaten their livelihood or recreation; or fear personal ridicule.
³

All these reasons apply to this day.

The Parks & Wildlife assessment form then in use was replaced by one based on an investigation into the Northern Rocky Mountain grey wolf. The new form exhaustively examined the phenomena of a sighting, to include: person by type (local, angler, shooter, hiker, etc.), observer's reliability (based on, for example, credibility within the community), location, length of time of sighting, number of people involved, mode of transport (including aircraft), nature of evidence (live, dead, tracks, scats, hair, call, fossil), description of animal including body colour, size, markings, distribution of stripes, head, tail, distance from animal (including more than 1 km), habitat (road, forest, beach, creek, etc.), light conditions (sun, moon, headlights, etc.), weather and visibility (including obscured vision), specific time of sighting, altitude, source of report (first-hand, second-hand, newspaper, museum, etc.), and correlation with other sightings since 1936.

Each element was rated. The rating system derived from the grey wolf survey form assigned a maximum of 10 points for the oberver's reliability and credibility; a maximum of 25 points for the animal's description, increased points for a lengthy, close-up sighting, and so on, to enable a grand total to be reached. Smith's report found that 107 sightings were rated ‘good', 101 ‘fair' and 112 ‘poor'. Twenty-plus years on, it's highly unlikely that a similar survey would rate sightings so generously. Not only has that much more time gone by without firm proof of the animal's continuing existence; the few experts in the state whose business it is to deal with sightings are necessarily far more rigorous in their assessments.

Even so, that hasn't stopped the sightings, with over a thousand in Tasmania to the present since 1936. In fact, as the body responsible for the thylacine, the Parks & Wildlife Service isn't universally admired for the stand it takes on the animal. Tiger hunters and enthusiasts beyond the public service tend to be referred to as ‘true believers'; one of them, north-eastern Tasmanian identity Buck Emberg, went public about it:

Now, perhaps, we can get the Parks & Wildlife people not to make tiger hunters and environmentalists like ourselves be seen as ‘kooks' as we have in the past. I do not argue about whether the animal exists or not. We now have about 100 sightings from the past 25 years from dozens of people and no, we will not share it with the Parks & Wildlife people. They do not deserve our trust . . . yet. The animal will have to survive on its own. One day soon, we hope, verification will come. Until then we wish the perhaps five bands of tigers good luck and happy hiding.
⁴

Denuded of native habitat though it is, the north-east has long been a hotbed of sightings. It represented one-third of Smith's ‘good' sightings and over one-third of the total sightings, with particular concentrations east and south of Golconda, where Emberg is based. Geographically, the north-east represents about 20 per cent of Tasmania's land surface. Whatever the cause, the conviction there is strong. Trevallyn resident Christine Lucas is a keen follower of the subject, arising out of personal experience. She is an example of an individual who has sighted but not reported. At the time of her encounter she had had but a ‘passing interest' in the animal:

I saw a tiger in Western Australia on New Year's Day 1991. I didn't report it for several reasons; they'd think I'd had a heavy night celebrating (I don't drink actually) and because at that point I had never heard of a tiger being sighted in the West . . . The one we saw was crossing a road as we came out of the Darling Range forests and into more open rural country heading from Perth north towards Northam. It seemed to be ‘loping' across the road, was in no hurry. The only difference I saw was that the hind legs were not as tall as the one the artist drew [in
Australian Geographic
July–September 1986] . . . I can assure you I was not thinking Tassie Tiger at the time (on the way to visit family with a car load of our family too) and my ‘imagination' has never seen one since! I was relating the experience to a friend here in Launceston and she said some years ago an old friend of theirs hit a Tassie Tiger while driving on the east coast of Tasmania. They were worried that they may have hurt it so reported it to the CSIRO in Hobart. They had just a little fur from their roo bar as evidence. Interestingly they were told not to speak to anyone about it. I am afraid I don't know the people or the year.
⁵

In the north-west, true believer James Malley, who had formed the Thylacine Expedition Research Team with Jeremy Griffith and Bob Brown in 1972, remains an active and credible hunter and enthusiast. One of the most recent sightings, reported to him, of a thylacine chasing wombats, is also considered to be the best for many years. As reported by
The Mercury
in the winter of 2002:

Tiger hunter James Malley, who has spent almost half a century searching for a thylacine, said he had no reason to doubt the report. The man who said he saw the tiger is reluctant to go public because of the stigma associated with sightings . . . ‘It was definitely a tiger, I get news of sightings like this extremely regularly and it all fits,' said Mr Malley, who immediately went to the area of the reported sighting. ‘That's not the only one I have heard of in that area. Over the past two years I have probably had five and all fit with a seasonal pattern.' The man who reported the sighting said he had stopped his four-wheel-drive to engage its hubs and had turned the engine off. ‘The wombats went past him for about fifteen metres, flat out into the bush,' said Mr Malley, who has scaled back the time he personally devotes to tiger searches. ‘Then in front of him, the tiger was no further than five metres away. He was dumbfounded. The tiger stopped. He saw it for more than ten seconds and it just stopped and stared at him . . .' Mr Malley said he had been unable to find tiger footprints in the area [but] conditions were ideal for thylacines because there was plenty of game about but, like any animal facing extinction, the tigers were wary.
⁶