Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [31]
He laid the pademelon down on the sandy track. We studied its soft brown-gray fur, and its long, carrot-shaped tail. Its head unfortunately was too squashed to give any sense of its original shape.
We practiced the name, muttering “pademelon, paddy-melon, pad-eee—mell-uhn.”
Geoff took a length of rope and tied it around the pademelon's legs and neck. He tied the other end to the back of the four-wheel drive. Then we drove off along the rutted track with the carcass bouncing along behind us.
“What we're doing is creating a scent trail,” Geoff said. Tasmanian devils, he explained, can smell the perfume of death from a mile away. So by laying down the alluring scent of Eau de Dead Pademelon, we would draw devils—out on a night of scavenging—to follow this road, too. “Devils like to hunt along streams and creeks, and they treat roads the same. So they'll wander along this track, follow this scent trail we're drag-ging—and know that food will be out there.”
“Is this what they like to eat?” We glanced back at the pademelon.
“Devils are carnivores, or meat eaters,” he said. “But they prefer to feed on animals that are already dead.”
“Do they ever hunt?”
“They can. Younger devils hunt more than older ones. A young devil coming out of the den could survive on a feed of moths for a night. They eat quite a variety of foods. Moths. Lizard eggs. Wallabies … Americans. They'll devour a carcass bones and all.”
Being dined on by devils is actually one of the things Tasmanians fear about the bush. Not really that devils would attack you—but that they might eat your body if you died in a remote area. There's also the vague concern that a devil might try to gnaw on you if you were injured.
“Naaaah,” Geoff said when we asked about this. But then he added, “Devils certainly have a very good sense of when other animals are weak and infirm though.” With their incredible noses, they follow or track sick animals—sometimes showing up before an animal is quite dead. He paused and lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “That's why we call them the auditors of the dark.”
He poked his head out the window and abruptly stopped the Pajero. “This is encouraging. I can see Tassie devil tracks here in the sand.”
We pulled out one of our guidebooks—Tracks, Scats and Other Traces: A Field Guide to Australian Mammals by Barbara Triggs—and turned to the “Tracks” section. It said, “The Tasmanian devil has squarish footprints, distinctive because the four forward-pointing toes that are visible on the front and hind foot tracks are evenly spaced and level.” The tracks in the sand looked like little bear claw prints.
We walked around to the back of the Pajero to see if the pademelon was still attached. Some of it was. We wondered when we might see an animal with all its parts.
“At night, we'd have seen two hundred animals by this time—walla-bies, bandicoots, possums, wombats,” Geoff said. “This is wonderful habitat for devils because there's so much food.”
“So most of the animals in Tasmania come out after dark?”
“That's their time.”
It was hard to believe we were in a wildlife paradise. Besides the dead pademelon, there wasn't an animal in sight.
Geoff drove on through the pale grasses until we reached the coast and saw waves crashing against a rocky beach. Fractured outcrops of pink quartzite jutted from the sea and formed ramparts on the shoreline.
“Welcome to King's Run,” Geoff said. His property stretched along three and a half miles of undeveloped coastline. It was stunning. An enormous block of bright blue sky hovered over a sea of beach grasses waving in the wind. Blue-green waves shot into fountains of spray and foam as they broke against the rose-colored rocks.
Some of the outcrops were as big as houses and covered with multicolored lichens—living organisms that are a combination of algae and fungi. They were rust red, burned orange, and pale green. Usually these vivid encrustations are considered a sign of good air quality.
Geoff confirmed that