Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [91]
“Those potoroos don't have a burrow to hide in or anything. There's nowhere they can go to get away from the fox,” said John. They couldn't climb trees like the possum.
Even though our encounter with the potoroos was brief, we found them delightful. Like many of Tasmania's native mammals, they were eccentric and had an Alice in Wonderland quality. The thought of an intentionally introduced predator shredding through their numbers was maddening.
Ken and John decided to call it quits on the farm. Like all the other fox hunts on the island so far, ours had been unsuccessful. Ken drove us back to Launceston. On the way, we continued to scan the road and surrounding fields for quadrupeds, striped, red, fluffy, and otherwise. But we saw nothing on four legs. Ken told us his night was just beginning. He would be checking out another reputed fox haunt and then, in the early hours of the morning, go whistling for foxes. From the outskirts of town, we watched as Ken's vehicle disappeared into the Tasmanian night.
“These guys are my heroes,” said Alexis, staring down the dark road. “They're on the front lines of the war to protect biodiversity.”
And they were fighting an invisible enemy. We hoped the Red Fog didn't win.
18. SUNBATHING IN HELL
“Oh, there seem to be naked people with us today.” Two elderly women were pointing at Alexis, who lay on a lawn with his shirt off and his shorts hiked up.
We had been invited to the Field Day at the Launceston Field Naturalists Club. It was a combination picnic and flora-and-fauna hunt on the club's grounds in Myrtle Bank, about twenty-five miles northeast of Launceston. The drive over had been hellacious. The outdoor temperature gauge in the Pajero read 30 degrees Centigrade—which in Fahrenheit translated as “insanely hot.” If we had cracked the egg of a Tasmanian native hen, we could have cooked it on the blacktop. To make things worse, Tasmania was being hit by wildfires—and the air was tinged with the smell of smoke. Several of the club's members were skipping the day's activities in order to protect their homes from the licking flames.
We found the man who had invited us to the event under the shade of a big spreading eucalyptus tree. His name was Jim Nelson, and he was an expatriate American who had been living in Tasmania for the past three decades. Todd Walsh, our escort into the watery world of the giant lobster, had suggested we get in touch with him.
“What's his specialty?” we had asked Todd.
“Ahh … everything. He knows every blade of grass in the bloody bush.”
Jim was tall, sunburned, and rangy. For the last couple of years, he had been doing research on burrowing crayfish. “Todd may study the largest crayfish,” he said in a deep booming voice that sounded remarkably like William Hurt. “But I study one of the world's most highly evolved ones.”
Jim opened the trunk of his car. It held a small library of files containing scientific papers, natural history books, and specimens. He removed a vial containing a crayfish embalmed in alcohol, and we noticed Jim had huge hands. If a crayfish latched its claws on to one of his mitts, he probably wouldn't even feel it.
“This crayfish is actually the one that's on the club's land here and it's an endangered species. It's called Engaeus orramakunna, the Mount Arthur burrowing crayfish. It makes its living from burrowing down to the water table rather than living in free water. Consequently, it's changed its morphology to accommodate that sort of burrowing. So when you look at it, it's quite absurdly proportioned. It's got this tiny little tail and this great big bulldozer front end. Its carapace is laterally compressed and its claws are held vertically, so it can squeeze through really tight spaces. It's quite amazing for a water animal to make all these adaptations to live in soil.”
Jim was wearing a black T-shirt with illustrations showing E. orramakunna