Mainland Tassie Devils?

[Thylacoleo Gal]

hi Questers - hah & maybe Dennis especially!
we're planning - hrrrm, well kicking round an idea, more accurately! - a photosurvey in central Vic sometime soon. any extra info/directions on those Tassie Devils would be most appreciated. Have maps etc - and have some ARFRA notes on the subject+ that info about the Tassie Devil roadkills. the topo down near Mt Franklin->Mt Wombat looks sorta more promising than Harcourt ->Maldon->Cairn Curran? Opinions, thoughts?

After the success with the Gurdies Bobucks we got 2 thinking that maybe small populations really can hang out near people - and nobody notices? thought we might test the idea .. with some special techniques.
thanks - Debbie

[Deleted]

You could start off with some sound activated recording gear, devils are noisy little b...s and if there are any in the area you will soon hear them. ;D

[Thylacoleo Gal]

that's an idea, Dennis! how do Devils den? Down a burrow or just out in the scrub?
best - Debbie

[Deleted]

I don't know if they dig but they seem to make a lot of use of natural formations, like caves and hollow logs, fallen trees and bracken fern also seem to provide plenty of cover. I have seen them moving around in daylight but they seem to be much quieter and more careful until it gets dark and then they go beserk. They will squabble in the daytime and you can fool them into coming out by making the right noises (I demonstrated this at Ballarat Wildlife Park and got the devils to come out of the scrub for the tourists). ;D

[Deleted]

I'd start at Yellingbow along the worri Yallock creek.

[Thylacoleo Gal]

near Seville u mean? i'd go along with that - there have been a few roadkills from east of melbourne haven't there? Close to Healesville too. we reckon if(?!?) there really are Tassie Devils in Victoria it's almost sure they'd be descendants of zoo escapees and not original mainlanders. Opinions?
Debbie

[wally1]

Greetings dear People
When I was a kid an old aunt used to tell me stories about when they were pioneering at Lara. Between Melb and Geelong.
This was circa 1880-90.
They were clearing forest and she spoke of "panthers" and tasmanian devils.
Devils have always been around on mainland.
Cheers Wally

[Deleted]

Debbie,

the best way to coaxe the old Devil out of his hiding place is to use meat whether that be road kill or offall - the more it smells the better!! I think the main feature of this animal is it's olfactory senses, being able to smell carrion from up to 4 Kilometres away! When Devils get on the scent of something they tend to have a fairly one tracked mind - I have observed them many a time up around the NE and other places in Tas honing in on dead animals during the day and the night!

Hope this helps

[Deleted]

Yes Debbie neer seville theres been sightings in the area in the past. watch out for the blackberrys

[Thylacoleo Gal]

thankz 4 the tip trout! we use meat broth based liquid lures a fair bit, mainly cuz solid lures tend to get eaten pretty quick so then there's no reason for critters to come back. And be photographed! however it still has the problem that most contacts are small rodent-type animals that use up the camera's memory pretty quick. we're testing a new algorithm to try and get round that.

blackberries?? know all about them, unfortunately.

[Deleted]

Theres also been sightings of Tas Tiger and Big Cats in the Yellingbow area

[Thylacoleo Gal]

i seem to remember there was a pretty good thylacine report from the Mansfield area about a year ago? think we passed it on 2 ARFRA?
Debbie

[Deleted]

I was an assoc member of AFRA for 5 years

[Thylacoleo Gal]

No kidding! I don't actually know anyone from ARFRA apart from Mike - dad & my brother met Peter Chapple, tho. there used to be a "survey form" @ thylacoleo.com that visitors could fill out & send in sightings reports. we sent those onto ARFRA. It used a public domain CGI server to email the data. i'm learning PERL at the moment so when I get the hang of it I'll put it up on the website again. Running with QfT code this time!

[Cantona]

admin said:

near Seville u mean? i'd go along with that - there have been a few roadkills from east of melbourne haven't there? Close to Healesville too. we reckon if(?!?) there really are Tassie Devils in Victoria it's almost sure they'd be descendants of zoo escapees and not original mainlanders. Opinions?
Debbie

I've heard it rumoured that the devils in Victoria may represent a sub-species. The Devils in Victoria are apparently much more elusive than their Tasmanian counterparts, and reports appear to go back to the time of the first European settlement.

www.oneworldwildlife.org/australia.html

[Deleted]

I have seen them in the wild in Central Vic and the locals appear somewhat larger than those that I have seen in captivity. I don't know if this indicates a sub-species or just more freedom to grow. Has anyone compared devils in the wild in Tas to those in captivity?

Noises in the bush scared some new arrivals in the Tyaak area to run into town to escape the "monsters", from the description of the sounds it appeared they had heard a couple of large devils. ;D

[cantona]

Out of interest, does the Australian government have an official line on the presence of Devils on the mainland?

[Thylacoleo Gal]

Don't think so?

[Tassie Devils]

They are bound to have a database but it is all take with that mob and no give.
Wally

[Deleted]

yeah i think in the last 100 years 5 tassie devils have inexplicably been found on the mainland. the last two in 1991 as roadkill some 150km apart. i'm more a tiger man myself - and there's some tantalizing evidence that a relict population of thylacines was still on the mainland up until the 1850's: this is based on the naturalist Cambrian having personally examined a dead one found in the Blue Mountains, and also conversations he had with Charles Sturt, who claimed to have seen one on his travels, along with corroborating recollections by certain South Australian Aboriginal tribes at the time, as well, finally by a further statement by a Dr. John Litchfield who said in 1839:' the dog faced Dasyurus.... in the province of South Australia... their ravages are pretty much confined to the thinly settled districts'. Cambrian gave the thylacine's distribution on the mainland as extending from Sydney to the Flinders' Ranges. You never know... people like to draw parallels between the extinction of both the devil and the tiger on the mainland but... the devil still exists here, obviously in very scarce numbers, so, perhaps, does the thylacine. Even if it does happen to be extinct the sober, matter of factly statements made by people in the mid 1800's seem to suggest that the thylacine at least survived on the mainland up until then. Ranger Nick Mooney said there's a correlation between wedge tailed eagles and thylacines due to similarities in diet, where you get one you normally would get the other: you should see how many wedge tails circle the skies of the Flinders...

[Deleted]

naturalist Cambrian having personally examined a dead one found in the Blue Mountains,

I live in the Blue Mountains and this is a really interesting claim, can you give the source the quote was taken from please.

MikeW

[Deleted]

hey MikeW,
the sources i quoted from are from Robert Paddle's Book: The Last Tasmanian Tiger. In it Paddle writes: ' the Victorian naturalist Cambrian wrote a series of articles on the natural history of mainland Australian marsupials ( in 1855 ). While he noted that he 'never saw a living specimen' he records having personally examined the remains of two mainland thylacines, one of them being the head, feet and skin of a thylacine killed in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney... from the additional sources he quotes as recording mainland thylacines - the South Australian explorer Charles Sturt - together with the mainland distribution limits he suggested for the species ' from the Sydney district... to Lake Torrens '. I have been unable to locate Sturts' comments on South Australian thylacines ...'
Paddle then goes on to quote Dr. John Litchfield in 1839 at a lecture:' The dog faced Dasyurus, or native dog, is a marsupial mammal... with transverse stripes of a brownish black colour on its back. These animals occasion much annoyance to the first settlers of a country. In Van Diemen's Land it was found neccessary to offer a reward... In the province ( of South Australia ) it was also found neccessary to offer a reward for destroying them, but their ravages are now pretty much confined to the thinly settled districts.'
Paddle then sites Mount Bob Serle, an aboriginal of the Adnyamathanhan tribe, who died aged 100 in 1919, as having seen one in his childhood.
I personally believe that there's something in these 4 documented accounts of thylacines on the mainland. Unlike documented cases today, these 1800 observations are objective, sober, and quite matter of fact. These guys were in an Australia that was relatively new to them and they were, in my mind, quite simply recording what they saw at the time, without any of the hysteria or downright delusion that accompanies many recorded sightings today. These people had no reason to lie or to even be swept up with tiger fever, for back then, everything would have seemed pretty new to them so I feel they just would've recorded whatever they saw. I personally am still out as to whether there are mainland thylacines today ( although stranger things in science have happened ), but I do feel that it's more than safe to say MikeW, that, up to 150+ years ago, you DID have thylacines lurking in your backyard...

[cantona]

Well I'm an optimist, but i think the Thylacine still inhabits parts of the mainland. The truth is defo out there....

[Thylacoleo Gal]

hey MikeW,the sources i quoted from are from Robert Paddle's Book: The Last Tasmanian Tiger. casuarius1 is dead right. i think it's chap 2 in Bob Paddle's book where he talks about SA thylacines in the 19th century. apparently there used to be a bounty on them? it's all biblioed/referenced in his book. so yeah, i'd say u definitely have to keep an open mind on it.
Debbie

[Deleted]

but I do feel that it's more than safe to say MikeW, that, up to 150+ years ago, you DID have thylacines lurking in your backyard...

"Did have" is enough
Thanks for that casuarius1, I like your work !!
Its pretty interesting stuff eh Deb.
Mike W

[Thylacoleo Gal]

Sure is. and remember - the last fossil or stuffed museum specimen is not (necessarily!) the last living critter.

[Deleted]

in David Owen's book on the tassie tiger he cites Eric Guiler as having potential 19th century evidence of thylacine activity in the Kimberely region - interesting that in the early 80's some photos of a thylacine were published in New Scientist, taken by a bush tracker who was searching for thylacines in this region. basically, the photos were 'inconclusive', they were obviously of some sort of animal, if not a thylacine then something reasonably cleverly done up as one... the worrying thing though apparently was that in one of these photos there is a shadow of a man holding a gun. some experts studying the photos said that whatever the animal was it was in a state of rigor mortis, propped up against a tree that concealed its head - the implication being that this tracker had blown the head off, at the least, a living creature for his photos, or, at worst, a mainland thylacine and then passed the photos on to New Scientist... i'm assuming Eric Guiler's evidence of thylacine activity in WA comes from his book: Thylacine, The Tragedy of the Tasmanian Tiger, which for the life of me i cannot seem to find a copy of. i know it's a big ask, but if anyone out there has that book and could perhaps take the time out to post his evidence on this message board, that would be really appreciated. i'm assuming the documented evidence will be scanty, as the sources for SA thylacines i quoted were, so it should only take a few minutes to type out. if this is not too much to ask, you'd be making a compulsive thylacine searcher a happy casuarius casuarius johnsonii ;D

[Deleted]

Sorry I havent got the text in front of me but I do recall a paper by Mike Archer describing a Thylacine bone (humerus ?) from the Kimberley area of northwestern Australia as being aged 0 plus or minus 80 years.

But you can't trust carbon dating so they say, so the date on that must be wrong. Everyone knows thylacines died out thousands of years ago anyhow.

But - if you cant trust carbon dating - how do we know the carcase from the Mundrabilla cave is 2800 years old? Maybe it was 10000 years old? Or maybe, since it was being eaten by beetles when they found it, it was only a couple of weeks old?

Thats the trouble with science. There are always margins of error.

[Thylacoleo Gal]

C14 has a wavy calibration curve so if the date falls on the top of, ie the flat section, of the wave, the error margin can be 100's of years. That might throw out recent dates like for mainland Tassie Devils that supposedly went exinct about 600(?) years ago. One thing that intrigues QfT is how extinction dates of Aussie marsups correlate with climate crises and migration of human populations elsewhere round the world. eg
mainland Tassie Devil extinct(?) 600 ybp<-> Little Ice Age, northern hemisphere.
Mainland Thylacine extinct(?) 5000 ybp(?) <-> World drought, collapse of Egyptian Old Kingdom etc, immigration into Aus from NW India, Dingos arrive from NW India,
New England diprotodon, extinct 6000 ybp (Kohen - date is an outlier?) <-> ditto climate downturn? (Similar date to Wrangle Island mammoths?)
Genyornis <-> Flannery et al reckon ~40kybp but dates are from arid centre (climate oscillates?). Rock art @ Eucolo, Pimba, Balparana & other places puts humans/MF together + Tindale (1951) cited highly detailed Koorie stories about hunting of "big birds but not emu" contemporary with erupting volcanoes in west Victoria, some of which he puts as "not many centuries ago". (Rec SA Museum 4, 30/6/1951, p381) The guys who discovered the Hobbits in Indonesia held out hopes some may still be around coz of the highly detailed stories the local people tell about them. so a similar scenario ? Ok, that doesn't mean any MF are still around "out there" - and QfT is NOT saying anything like that! - but it might mean some survived into slightly more recent times than textbooks say?
Have a hunch Aussie MF were confined to narrow corrdidors/habitat islands @ various times during climate crises? Sudden onset climate spikes/downturns give the impression they're quite numerous and sort-of-periodic?
Debbie

[cantona]

casuarius1 said:

in David Owen's book on the tassie tiger he cites Eric Guiler as having potential 19th century evidence of thylacine activity in the Kimberely region - interesting that in the early 80's some photos of a thylacine were published in New Scientist, taken by a bush tracker who was searching for thylacines in this region. basically, the photos were 'inconclusive', they were obviously of some sort of animal, if not a thylacine then something reasonably cleverly done up as one... the worrying thing though apparently was that in one of these photos there is a shadow of a man holding a gun. some experts studying the photos said that whatever the animal was it was in a state of rigor mortis, propped up against a tree that concealed its head - the implication being that this tracker had blown the head off, at the least, a living creature for his photos, or, at worst, a mainland thylacine and then passed the photos on to New Scientist... i'm assuming Eric Guiler's evidence of thylacine activity in WA comes from his book: Thylacine, The Tragedy of the Tasmanian Tiger, which for the life of me i cannot seem to find a copy of. i know it's a big ask, but if anyone out there has that book and could perhaps take the time out to post his evidence on this message board, that would be really appreciated. i'm assuming the documented evidence will be scanty, as the sources for SA thylacines i quoted were, so it should only take a few minutes to type out. if this is not too much to ask, you'd be making a compulsive thylacine searcher a happy casuarius casuarius johnsonii ;D

I have that book, and will post what he says when I get chance. For details on the Aboriginal tracker, see the kevin Cameron thread.

cheers