Carnivorous Nights (23 page)

After publishing their report, the three tiger hunters went in different directions. James continued to search for the thylacine. But he also went on to become a prosperous farmer, branching out from dairy cows into peas, potatoes, and even opium poppies. (“It was good money,” he said.) He also worked in real estate and had staked a claim on an opal mine on the mainland. He had recently enrolled his daughter, Bronwyn, in a correspondence course to learn how to cut opals. When we visited, James was in the process of renovating his house. He showed us that his fireplace was made from “convict bricks,” each one with the thumbprint of the man who made it while serving out his sentence. “I've done a lot in my life,” James said. “The only thing that could make me happier would be to see a tiger.”

Jeremy and Bob also continued to make names for themselves and stir up controversy. Jeremy finished his university degree and later founded a philosophical society called the Foundation for Humanity's Adulthood and wrote several books, including
A Species in Denial
and
Beyond the Human Condition.
Jeremy was the subject of a critical documentary titled
The Prophet of Oz
on the Australian news show
Four Corners
, and he
later successfully sued the television network for defaming him. Bob Brown went on to become a senator, the first Green Party member elected to the Australian Senate, as well as the first openly gay member of Parliament.

“Did you vote for him?” we asked.

James looked slightly shocked. “Oh, I'm a conservationist, but I would never vote Green,” he said. Bob Brown had been the best man at his wedding—but politics were politics.

James, of course, was the only member of the expedition who remained a believer. “There's no doubt, the tigers are there,” he told us. “It's just a matter of finding them.” From his perspective the tiger is a rare species—and it needed people's help. “Australia's got a lot to learn about conservation,” he said. “Indigenous people knew how to take care of the land. Maybe we should give it back to them.”

We showed James a map of the Southwest and pointed to the place we intended to hike, the South Coast Track. He gave it a glance and said simply, “That's hopeless.” Though it was in one of the least developed parts of Tasmania, with 5,300 square miles protected in national parks and world heritage areas, it had never been rich in animals.

James pulled an old map out of the box and gave it to us. On it, Tas-mania's rough coastline was surrounded by blue ocean. Inland, there were probably ten blue rivers for every yellow road and highway. And range after range of broken hills. James pointed to the place along the Arthur River where he had heard the tiger calling when he was thirteen years old. We marked it with a little blue X.

“What you need to do,” he said, “is go south of the Arthur River, find a high ridge, and just sit there after dusk and listen.”

A
fter saying good-bye to James, we found ourselves driving once again along the narrow peninsula that led to the stark-walled Nut. It was still long before sunset and the road was blissfully clear of animals. We had agreed to meet Dorothy and Chris in Stanley, where they had rented a cottage for the night.

“What do you want to do tonight?” Alexis asked.

“We were thinking of going to see the little blue penguins.”

“I've seen those before.”

“Where?”

“At the aquarium in Sydney.”

We tried to ratchet up his interest level. “They're the smallest penguin species in the world.”

“Yep, I know.”

“They're also the only blue penguins.”

No response. The extreme animal thing wasn't working this time.

We hadn't really had a chance to look at Stanley in the rush of our last visit. We'd been too rattled by our run-in with the suicide hen. Stanley turned out to be a historic fishing village of just a few winding streets. Its snug one-story, dormered houses—built when the town was founded in the mid-nineteenth century—now served mainly as restaurants, shops, and B&Bs. Though the human population of Stanley was stable at around six hundred residents, the village had undergone some demographic changes. Specifically, the local penguin population had skyrocketed from twelve to two hundred over the last six years.

Historically, little penguins had always nested on the shores of the Bass Strait, but as coastal towns like Stanley developed, fewer and fewer penguins came ashore. At one point, Stanley was down to just a few straggling penguins that were forced to reside under people's beachfront homes and beneath the tombstones at the town's seaside cemetery. To give the penguins better digs, Stanley residents built burrows on the lower slopes of the Nut, just a few hundred feet from the edge of town. As a result, Stanley's penguin population began to thrive.

We got the phone number for a penguin tour service from a flyer on the window of a local restaurant, and when we called, a cheery woman said a penguin van would pick us up at nine-ish. This was going to be another nighttime operation.

In the meantime, we decided to look around the town. Signs in pastelpainted tearooms and food shops offered Devonshire tea, abalone cakes, crayfish sandwiches, and fresh whole fish. At a shop called Hursey Seafoods, the fish were more than just fresh. Hursey's was more like an aquarium than a fish store. All kinds of fish—including tropical ones— were darting around giant Jacuzzi-sized tanks filled with seawater. A handwritten sign read, “BEWARE!! Please do not put hands in the tanks.” While we were ogling the swimming seafood, Chris walked in.
Earlier, he had stopped by Hursey's and ordered two dozen Tasmanian rock oysters and a live fish called a bastard trumpeter. The proprietors had asked him to come back in twenty minutes. It would take them that long to net his purchase.

Back at our motel, a cottage called the Pol and Pen, Chris turned into a one-man episode of
Emeril
, making a fire in the fireplace, uncorking bottles of Tasmanian wine, and serving freshly shucked oysters and a locally made Brie warmed in the kitchenette's oven as appetizers. He then whirred around, making a salad (from locally farmed greens) and broiling the bastard trumpeter. Dorothy and Alexis snuggled on the couch in front of the fire.

“Wow, I've only got three days left,” Dorothy said sadly.

“I'll miss you, paddypussums,” said Alexis.

This was too public a display of affection for us. While gulping down the small, briny oysters, we shared some more information about penguins.

“What's interesting is that these penguins have a lot of different common names. They've been called fairy penguins. Blue penguins. Little blue penguins. But whoever arbitrates these things in ornithological circles finally settled on just little penguins a few years ago.”

We felt a distinct lack of interest. “Sometimes the penguins wear sweaters,” we added.

“Yeah?” Alexis said. “I thought they wore tuxedos.”

We explained that there were sometimes nasty oil spills in the Bass Strait. It's a fairly heavily trafficked shipping zone. When a penguin swims into a slick and gets covered with oil, it can die of cold because the natural oils insulating its feathers are destroyed. Plus, if it starts preening itself, it can die from ingesting the petroleum. So what rescuers often do is pop oil-slicked penguins into tight-fitting wool sweaters. That keeps them warm and prevents them from preening until the oil dissolves or can be washed off. When they wear the sweaters, the penguins look like swanky 1960s ski bums.

After a big oil spill in 2000 an environmental group, the Tasmanian Conservation Trust, put out a call asking people to make penguin sweaters in preparation for the next disaster. They made available a knitting pattern that was published in craft magazines and promulgated on the Internet. And knitters around the world went nuts. Although the pattern was specific
to size (the sweaters were nine inches long and four inches wide) and the location of holes for head and flippers, knitters could use whatever colors and designs they wanted. In all, the trust received fifteen thousand wool sweaters before they had to beg the knitting world to put down its needles. The sweaters came in every color from basic black to shocking pink. Some contributors even knitted designs into the wool, such as bowties around the neckline (formal wear) and the emblems of soccer teams across the chest. One knitting circle sent in penguin-size jerseys representing the colors and captains of each of the fourteen Australian-rules football teams.

Alexis wasn't charmed. “It's another case of survival of the cutest,” he said.

He began rummaging among the supplies in the kitchenette, looking for something to eat for dessert. He came up with a chunk of Cadbury Dairy Milk bar and squeezed a layer of evaporated milk on top of a few squares. Then, still not satisfied, he took a spoon and plopped on a dollop of Tasmanian-made raspberry jam.

“Want one?” he said, holding out his goopy concoction.

“You know,” we offered, “you don't have to come out to see the pen-guins—if you don't feel like it.”

“No, no. Let's all stay together.”

A minivan picked us up and drove us to the edge of the Nut. From there, we walked up the lower slope to the penguin rookery. Other visitors were silently filing down the trail in the dark, following guides who held flashlights covered with red filters. Our guide explained that the penguins were sensitive to bright light. In fact, white light and flash photography can temporarily blind them.

Although we couldn't see the burrows in the dark, they were currently occupied by five-week-old baby penguins. The parent penguins spent their days fishing in the Bass Strait and came back at nightfall to feed the chicks. Our visit was timed to coincide with their return. As we walked up the rocky trail, we heard the muffled sound of the Bass Strait washing against the beach below us and the tremulous cries of young penguins urging their parents to come in from the sea.

Our group paused to allow penguin watchers who had arrived earlier to go down. While standing beside the trail, we looked to our right. Just three feet from our boots was a small fluffy penguin. We could have accidentally
stepped on it. The guide turned his red beam on the penguin. “He's waiting for his mother,” he said.

In the weird red light, the young penguin looked like a bowling-ball-sized powder puff. He was hunkered down, lying flat against a sand patch, his thin black beak pointing expectantly toward the sea. Instead of a blue tuxedo, he was wearing a brown-gray down coat. This little penguin had never even been in the water. In a few weeks, the guide told us, he would get his swimming feathers, trading in the coat of down for a slick blue tuxedo—composed of ten thousand waterproof feathers. In his current position, he looked completely defenseless.

“Maybe he should be wearing a sweater,” Chris whispered.

As we continued along the trail, we looked down the slope toward the sea and heard the parent penguins calling
huack, huack
as they prepared to come ashore. In the weak red light, we saw the dim forms of several foot-tall penguins slowly waddling up the rocky slope. They walked stooped forward slightly, their short flippers hanging by their sides. They reminded us of suburban commuters, straggling off their train after a late trip home and intoning, “What a day.” Two fluffy juveniles came down to meet their parent—we weren't sure if it was the mother or the father— and the adult penguin began to regurgitate fish into their beaks. We detected the scent of anchovies.

Coming out of the sea like this is dangerous for little penguins, which is why they do it under cover of darkness. Onshore predators included sea eagles, Tasmanian devils, and introduced species like dogs and feral cats. “They're really much more comfortable in the water,” said our guide. “Their scientific name is
Eudyptula minor
, which means good little diver.” In fact, little penguins can spend weeks on the water without coming onto land. Having traded in their wings for flippers, they can “fly” underwater, diving to depths of 150 feet. They can even float while they sleep. And they actually sleep for only around four minutes at a time— they're big on quickie naps called micro-sleeps.

While they face sea predators like sharks and seals, their tuxedos provide ocean camouflage. When seen from above, their blue backs blend in with the color of the sea. When seen from below, their white bellies look like reflections on the water's surface.

For all the human traffic in this rookery, it was a small-time operation compared to other penguin tourism spots in Australia. There are approximately
one million little penguins living along the coast and on islands in and around southern Australia and New Zealand, though their numbers have been cut nearly in half due to beachfront development. The biggest “Penguin Parade” is on the northern side of the Bass Strait at Phillip Island, about eighty miles from Melbourne. Phillip Island has five thousand penguins in its rookery and draws half a million tourists every year. The term “Penguin Parade” was even trademarked. That left us wondering what to call the Stanley penguin waddle. We drew up a short list of possibilities. Penguin Promenade. Penguin Perambulation. Penguin Pilgrimage. Penguin Pomp and Circumstance. Penguin Posse. Fairy Brigade. Fishy Feast of the Fairies.