Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [92]
“Faaaahbulous,” Alexis said. Click. “So where are you from originally, Jim?”
“The Midwest. I was born in Nebraska, but I did most of my growing up in Illinois on the Fox River, not far from Chicago.”
“Why did you move to Tasmania?” Click. “For the crayfish?”
“Um, well I was escaping Richard Nixon.”
“Post-Watergate depression?” Click.
“Well, Watergate really blew up after I came here. Richard Nixon was a real, you know …I was pretty discouraged with America. Most of my friends that went to Vietnam came back in body bags … so I was looking for something else. I had done a degree in psychology and biology and decided that there really wasn't any future for me there. I got involved in ceramics, and I came to Australia to study with a master potter. When I visited Tasmania, I found the lush green more agreeable than the dry mainland. Then I set up my own pottery in 1973, so I've been doing that ever since.”
Click. “So how did you start studying crayfish?”
“Well, originally with that giant one that Todd is interested in. Growing up, I was always interested in crayfish. There was something about them that fascinated me. Not so much from a scientific point of view but from an aesthetic one—”
“They're gorgeous.” Click.
Jim pointed at the specimen in his palm. “Engaeus is the genus of course and orramakunna is the aboriginal word for the name of the area. Tasmania's really a hot spot for burrowing crayfish. There's fifteen species of the Engaeus and fourteen species of another genus of burrowing crayfish that occur in our buttongrass plains.”
Alexis wrapped up his shoot. We told Jim we had spent the night in a buttongrass plain and had been surprised not to see any animals—not even a crayfish.
“Well, it can be really variable by the night. Was it a full moon? Most animals—little mammals in particular—don't much like moonlit nights. They're too visible to owls. They like at least a half-moon.”
Jim invited us into the club's study center. It was built out of mud bricks and wood. There were bunks, a kitchen, and a small, well-thumbed library. Many of the books, Jim informed us, had been written by members of the Field Naturalists Club. In fact, as a collective the club had published a book, A Guide to Flowers and Plants of Tasmania, now in its third edition, and it was the bible to the island's flora. They had used the proceeds to build this clubhouse.
The club's official emblem was an illustration of a Tasmanian tiger perched on a rock overlooking a valley. The emblem was pictured on name tags pinned to club members' shirts and burned into the wood of a long table in the middle of the clubhouse. It was a regal-looking thylacine. With its head lifted nobly, it was the kind of heroic figure that inspired optimism. We wondered if any of these naturalists thought the tiger was still alive.
We asked Jim what he thought about the thylacine.
“I don't think it's out there anymore.” Our hopes sank again. Jim thought the thylacine's large size and the fact that there hadn't been a body found or a photograph taken in nearly seventy years made its survival highly unlikely. “The kind of sightings that people make …well, people see something and they want to see something else. So I don't trust all the sightings. Having said that, there have been a couple of really good ones. And there's a zoologist, who's long retired by now—Bob Green—he's still of the opinion that they're out there somewhere.”
While the field naturalists ate lunch and chatted, we wandered around eavesdropping, hoping to overhear some sagacious conversation about the tiger. There were experts on everything else: orchids (“there are more than 190 orchid species in Tasmania, including 50 that are endemic”), eucalyptus trees (“twenty-nine