Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [116]
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?”
24. BLOOD AND SLOPS
We 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:
An exceptionally large proportion of these sightings have occurred on the Tasman Highway in the North East, particularly in the Sideling and Weldborough areas. In these areas the highway passes through wet sclerophyll forest and rainforest which are continuous with extensive forests on each side of the highway, including habitats which, historically, are known to have been used by the thylacine, and where many bounty payments were made.
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