Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [82]
He ushered us into the task force's Operations Room and showed us a wall-sized map of Tasmania. It was studded with green, blue, yellow, and red pins. “Each of these represents a fox sighting,” he said. “Yellow ones are unlikely, green ones are possible, blue ones are excellent, and the red ones are dead foxes. We've had two dead.” The two red pins were just south of Launceston.
The fox task force is a branch of the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, but it looked more like the offices of Interpol or Quantico. Posters of rusty red, bushy-tailed canids were plastered on the walls, describing their habits and asking citizens to be on the lookout for suspicious characters: “Watch for foxes.” Sightings could be phoned in to the task force hotline—1-300-FOX-OUT—twenty-four hours a day.
Before being appointed to the task force, Chris had performed a variety of jobs for the Parks Service, including relocating fur seals that were raiding fishing traps. His size and his ease in the ocean (he grew up surfing in Tasmania's treacherous waters) made him a perfect match for the job. But now he mostly stayed in the office, coordinating anti-fox operations and sending officers out to investigate sightings. Chris handed us a manual, Managing Vertebrate Pests: Foxes. The cover pictured two fugitive foxes, one gazing into the camera with the defiance of a serial killer and the other gripping an unidentified marsupial in its jaws. Inside, there was a lurid photo of a blood-soaked lamb, the handiwork of a fox.
On a whiteboard covered with numerous rough drawings, someone had been illustrating a lecture on the fox's gait, footprints, and claws. Beneath it on a table was a polished white fox skull, and next to that were several vials containing long, thin pieces of scat. They were waiting to be analyzed, Chris said. “So far, we've found four scats that have been from foxes.”
Chris grew up in Devonport, the city where the Spirit of Tasmania ferry docks, bringing in as many as 650 vehicles per day and 1,400 passengers. It's not far from Burnie, the port town on the northwest coast where the thin line between Tasmania and foxes first became apparent. In 1998, a worker at the Burnie dock saw a red fox jump off a container ship that was arriving from Melbourne's Webb Dock. As it happens, Webb Dock is home to one of the densest fox populations in the world. It's almost as if an army of foxes was massing on the border, just waiting for a chance to invade. In the Burnie incident, a mainland fox had apparently stowed away, hopping on at Webb Dock and hopping off in Tasmania. A frenzied chase ensued. Vulpine footprints were found in the sand at a nearby beach. But the fox was never caught. There was talk about tightening up Tasmania's borders and quarantine regulations. And wildlife experts like Chris began to gnaw their fingernails.
Then in 2001, a flurry of red fox sightings was reported near Longford, a small country town in Tasmania's Midlands just south of Launceston. A vacationing couple from England recognized the sound of two foxes calling to each other. A farmer said his chook house was attacked by a fox; he nearly cornered it but it slipped away. Then a respected naturalist had a close-range sighting in the same vicinity. The Tasmanian government became so concerned that expert foxhunters and their hounds were brought in from the mainland. It was thought these professional hunters would quickly track down the fugitives, and the hunters were accompanied by armed Tasmanians ready to shoot the fox on sight. Locally, the hunt stirred up high spirits. There were wagers on when the fox would be caught. Conspiracy theories flew through the community about how the foxes got there in the first place. And one local pub owner began serving up Boag's beer