Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [87]
“We're looking for eye shine and movement,” Ken said as we drove slowly through the paddocks. “You look for everything, anything.”
Up ahead, a pair of luminous orbs shone out from the darkness.
“What's that?” we asked excitedly.
“It's a sheep,” said Ken.
“Oh.”
A few seconds later, we heard a telltale baaaaaahhhhh and passed a ghost-white sheep surrounded by pale brown tussocks of grass. Its eyes flashed a wet globby green. We thought about when sheep were first brought to Tasmania in the early nineteenth century. On bright moonlit nights, their eyes must have looked like neon signs to Tasmanian tigers, blinking “EAT HERE.”
“You can get an idea of what animal you're looking at, just by the color and nature of the eye shine,” Ken said. “Sheep and deer eye shine is quite greenish, sometimes a yellowy green, and sometimes it appears blue. Brushtail possums have soft reddish eyes. Rabbits have amber eye shine. And wallaby, you get a little bit of eye shine, but not much—usually you'll see movement first.”
“And the fox?”
“With the fox, eye shine is the biggest and first indicator. It's not so much the color as the brightness. The color tends to change depending on the angle or atmospheric conditions. Sometimes a fox's eyes appear reddish, but mostly they're a really bright gold or silver color.” He paused to consider the shifty qualities of the fox. “You actually look for a bit of eye separation as well,” he added. “A cat gives you a fairly bright reflection, but it looks like it has only one eye. With the fox you can actually see the eye separation.”
Ken peered into night. As the spotlight swept the fields, we tried to use our newfound eye knowledge. Hopping rabbits and sauntering brushtail possums were all over the place—flashing us with amber eyes, red eyes. Groups of sheep flashed green and blue. It was like the stars had fallen onto the grassy farm fields.
A rabbit dashed across the headlights. For a moment, we were mesmerized by its golden gaze.
“Rabbits, of course, are nonnative,” Ken said. “You know the story of rabbits being brought to Australia?”
“Yeah, what a disaster,” Alexis said.
Tasmania's fox problem was only the most recent ecological catastrophe resulting from animal importations into Australia. Foxes and rabbits have a very close relationship, too. Both were introduced into the wilds of mainland Australia by English settlers for the purpose of hunting—the first foxes following on the hind legs of the first rabbits by only a few years. The first twenty-four rabbits were brought to Victoria in 1859. A typical female rabbit can have six litters a year, producing about thirty offspring. With reproductive capabilities like that, those original twenty-four rabbits permutated into an army. By the early 1900s, the continent was overrun. They nibbled grazing lands bare, destroyed the fragile landscape with their burrowing, and displaced native burrowers like the hare wallaby, bilby, and bandicoot. Eventually, mass rabbit hunts were organized. A two-thousand-mile-long fence was built to stop the rabbits from spreading. But the long-eared interlopers simply kept breeding—and dug under.
When foxes arrived in Australia, they could scarcely have found themselves in a more hospitable situation. Rabbits are their favorite food. But hungry foxes did not stop the rapidly breeding rabbits. Quite the contrary. The dastardly bunnies just hopped into new territories and provided food for more and more foxes. And when a fox can't find a rabbit, it will eat a marsupial instead. Together, foxes and rabbits have been called the “deadly duo”—bringing death and extinction to midsized marsupials all over Australia.
Ultimately, the rabbits were somewhat contained. Rabbit viruses were introduced in the 1950s and the