Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [44]
“That's so adorable,” whispered Alexis, as Shacky gnawed on the wal-laby's leg bone.
“She's still got a bit of a pouch,” Geoff said. Like other marsupials, devils give birth to embryo-sized young that have to crawl through their mother's fur to get to the safety of the pouch where the teats are located. Although there are only four teats available, female devils give birth to as many as thirty rice-grain-sized, naked young. Survival of the swiftest takes place as the newborns scramble to reach the pouch. Since only four can get teats, the rest perish. The ones that survive do most of their developing in the pouch, which is like a second womb. After a few months, the young devils venture out for the first time, but still return to the pouch for milk and protection for several more weeks. “The pouch should shrink when the young go off on their own,” Geoff explained. “She looks like she might still be taking care of her young in a den somewhere.”
Shacky gave a little twitch. It was clear that she sensed something out there in the dark. “Could it be a tiger?” Geoff whispered.
Suddenly, the quiet of the shack was ripped by a guttural demonic screaming, a combination of rabid dog and Linda Blair in The Exorcist. It was shocking, otherworldly, bizarre—thrilling. It ranged in pitch from deep throaty snarling to insectlike sibilation. A devil with a huge head (“that's a male,” Geoff said) charged down the hill and insinuated himself between Shacky and the carcass. An aggressive, whirling dance began, accompanied by a series of screams, hisses, and growls. First, the male tried to ram Shacky with his rump, but she turned on him howling and feinted at his face with her teeth. Then he turned his back on her and tried to gain a position on the carcass. But she whipped around shrieking and snarling, and butt-bumped him off. To counter, he tried to rumpram her, but she bit him, and he dashed offstage, with a small bloody wound on his left flank.
It had all happened in less than ten seconds—and we were left with the shocked, slightly guilty exhilaration one feels after witnessing a bloody bar fight.
“I guess that's why they call them devils,” Chris said.
Even Geoff was impressed. “That big male was at the top of the ranks.”
Shacky ambled back to her feed as if nothing had happened. Although female devils are considerably smaller than males, they regularly win such battles.
“You see it a lot with females, particularly when they've got young,” Geoff said. “They can be half the size of a male that will approach, but they defend the carcass and stay. It's about who's hungriest.”
We couldn't help but notice that Shacky was supersizing it. “How much can one devil eat?”
“On average, devils consume 15 percent of their body weight every night, but they can take in as much as 40 percent. This one belies the statistics. The amount of food I've seen Shacky eat over the last couple of months, she should be as fat as mud.”
We did a few calculations on a notepad. An average male devil weighing twenty-three pounds can, on a hungry day, eat more than nine pounds of meat and bone. That's comparable to Alexis, a 180-pound human male, eating 70 pounds of food in a twenty-four-hour period. We'd seen Alexis chow it down—particularly when he was high—but never quite like that.
“Why do devils eat so much?”
For one thing, Geoff said, devils have to cover long distances at night in search of food. If they haven't eaten, they're constantly in motion. Radio tracking has shown devils traveling as far as twenty miles in a single night. During these sojourns, they typically jog at a rate of six miles per hour. All that running requires energy. Plus, when females are nursing their young, they need much more food than the average devil.
Geoff pointed