Museums – The Endangered Dead. By Christopher Kemp

October 11, 2016October 16, 2018Leave a comment

We found Christopher Kemp’s terrific article dated February 2015 in Nature, the weekly online science journal. It shines a light on the plight of museums around the world and on their essential role in recording biodiversity and preventing future extinctions. Christopher has kindly shared with us additional photographs to accompany the extract we print here:

Across the world, natural-history collections hold thousands of species awaiting identification. In fact, researchers today find many more novel animals and plants by sifting through decades-old specimens than they do by surveying tropical forests and remote landscapes. An estimated three-quarters of newly named mammal species are already part of a natural-history collection at the time they are identified. They sometimes sit unrecognized for a century or longer, hidden in drawers, half-forgotten in jars, misidentified, unlabelled.

These collections are becoming increasingly valuable thanks to newly developed techniques and databases. Through DNA sequencing, digital registries and other advances, existing collections can be interrogated in new ways, revealing more about Earth’s biodiversity, and how quickly it is disappearing.

But just as the collections are growing more valuable, they are falling into decline. With many institutions struggling to cope with significant budget cuts, some collections are being neglected, damaged or lost altogether. And the scientists who study them are also threatened as their positions disappear.

“This is the repository of all life that we know has existed,” says Michael Mares, director of the Sam Noble Museum at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, and past president of the American Society of Mammalogists. “If you want to go back and do a survey of the mammals of Kuala Lumpur or something 30 years or 40 years ago, you can’t go back,” he says. “You have to go to the collections to do it.”

In 1758, with the publication of the encyclopaedic Systema Naturae, Carl Linnaeus attempted to classify nature — an effort that continues today at almost 8,000 natural-history collections around the world. The United States alone holds an estimated 1 billion specimens, and the global figure may reach 3 billion. The average institution displays only about 1% or less of its store. The rest — often hundreds of thousands of specimens — is catalogued and stored away, inaccessible to the public.

The collections are overseen by a dwindling corps of managers and curators — mainly taxonomists who describe species, and systematists who study the relationship between organisms. The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, had 39 curators in 2001. Today, there are just 21. At present, there is no curator of fishes — an enormously diverse class of animal. Neither The Field Museum nor the AMNH — which hold two of the largest collections in the world — has a lepidopterist on staff, even though both collections contain hundreds of thousands of butterfly and moth specimens. Similarly, the National Museum of Natural History has seen a steady drop in the number of curators — from a high of 122 in 1993 to a low of 81 last year.

The decline is not limited to the United States. “The situation in the United Kingdom is the same, or worse,” says Paolo Viscardi, chair of the UK-based Natural Sciences Collections Association and a curator at the Horniman Museum in London. Commonly, a museum will restructure its staff, replacing three or four curatorial positions with a single collections manager, and sometimes an assistant. That manager might cover every discipline, from contemporary art to the natural sciences.

Museum staff and researchers have a name for the barriers that slow down species discovery: the taxonomic impediment. And one measure of the taxonomic impediment is the lag time — the gap between when a new species is first collected and when it is identified. Currently, the average lag time is 21 years².

It is not clear whether that lag is increasing, but it often stretches much longer than the average. In April 1856, Henry Clay Caldwell of the United States Navy found a large, fruit-eating bat on the Samoan island of Upolu. The specimen currently resides at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and details of the find are now scarce: a few faded, hand-written descriptors on a box, a skull and a fragment of discoloured skin. In 2009, Kristofer Helgen, a mammal curator at the Smithsonian Institution, held the skull up to the light and realized it was an unknown species. More than 150 years after it was first collected, he named the species Pteropus allenorum — the small Samoan flying fox³. The species is already extinct on the island.

Researchers say that such work is crucial for understanding biodiversity and how it is being threatened. “We are in the middle of a biodiversity crisis, and collections-based institutions have a unique role in society to document that biodiversity,” says Quentin Wheeler, a taxonomist and president of the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York in Syracuse. “When we only know 10–20% of the species, we’re at a huge disadvantage to detect changes in the environment, whether it’s species extinctions or introductions or whatever.”

Christopher Kemp is a scientist and writer in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His book on species discovery and natural history collections, titled The Lost Species, will be published in 2017.

Read the whole article at nature.com here.

Thylacine Ghosts – by Gabbee Stolp

October 10, 2016October 16, 20181 Comment

Australia-based artist Gabbee Stolp on her Thylacine Ghosts project (2016):

My work is a study of the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), as a symbol for repairing the relationship between human beings and the natural world. This carnivorous marsupial was led to extinction by human hands, the last of its kind dying in captivity 80 years ago. Presently we find ourselves witnessing the era of the Anthropocene, whereby human actions are driving continued environmental degradation and mass extinction; the thylacine has come to represent both a sense of regret for species loss in general and the loss of something wild or animal in ourselves. Precious objects created from natural materials mimic the thylacine; they stand as icons of what has been lost and become monuments for confrontation, veneration and reflection. Through the practice of object-making – carving, stitching and piecing together – an opportunity is created for hope, atonement and reparation of the human relationship with nature.

Thylacine Ghost I: Protection

Thylacine Ghost II: Destruction

Thylacine Ghost III: Woman

Thylacine Ghost IV: Myth

Thylacine Ghost V: Burden

Thylacine Ghost VII: Skeleton

Thylacine Ghost VIII: Mending

Thylacine Ghosts I – VIII

Photos 1-5 by Isaac Panaretos, 6-9 by Tim Panaretos

Departure Lounge – by Peter Forward

October 5, 2016October 16, 20181 Comment

Australian artist Peter Forward talks about his work:

My project: “Departure Lounge” in some ways extends the tradition of natural science art. The medium I use is discarded cardboard packaging, sourced from living trees, the home of many species as well as the lungs of the planet. Within the constraints of this medium, I try to represent Australian threatened small mammals as accurately as possible. My work also references the inherent threats that human needs pose to the existence of many species and ecosystems. I work with wildlife conservation scientists which has made me very aware of how poorly wild Australia is being treated: part of planet Earth’s current extinction crisis.

Australia has an appalling extinctions record, the worst on earth. “Squirrel Glider” [above] is one of 6 flying marsupials most of which are also declining. There is probably another in North Australia which has not yet been described formally – we are still losing species before we even have learned of their existence! As a developed and wealthy country I see no excuse, hence my arts activity.

Above: Boodie

Burrowing Bettong or Boodie (Bettongia lesueur): Once common in most of southern Australia, is now only found on tiny islands off the WA coast which have no cats or foxes. Now extinct on the mainland, the Boodie served a very important function in the Australian grassland ecosystem. As it foraged, it mixed organic matter into the soil, spreading fungi and seeds. This mixing also increased water absorption into the soil and reduced the combustible material under trees, decreasing the likelihood of fire. These actions helped maintain the balance of trees, shrubs, and grasses. The loss of small, ground-foraging animals after European settlement together with hard hoofed stock animals almost certainly contributed to widespread soil deterioration. Boodies live communally, several hundred can inhabit one site and warrens can be enormous. On introduction to Australia rabbits simply pushed the bettongs aside and took over the burrows.

Above: Numbat

Below: Bilby

Bilby (Macrotis lagotis): Bilbies would have to be the cutest animal you could imagine. They are a bit awkward-looking when they run or hop, but they have the poise of little ballet dancers. They are about the size of a rabbit but are adapted to very harsh, arid and extreme places. The favourite food is mycorrhizal fungi which most plants/trees here require (underground fungi – a bit like truffles). So they are out there digging every night turning over the desert sands. There were two species of Bilby but one is extinct. From the arid interior of Australia to the temperate coastal areas, Bilbies were common, but this was a hundred years ago. Today, changes in their habitat have seen their range reduced and their status listed as ‘vulnerable’. They are now in competition with introduced animals which graze on plants used by Bilbies. Foxes and feral cats have become the main predators. Even changing fire patterns have contributed to their demise in certain areas due to impact on type and availability of food sources. This has led to isolated populations surviving in pockets in arid regions.

Below: Leadbeater’s possum

Leadbeater’s possum (Gymnobelideus leadbeateri): This is an endangered small marsupial which is dependant on old growth eucalypt forests with established hollows for its home. As a result it is now located in small pockets of old growth Mountain Ash forest in Victoria’s Central Highlands. Its numbers are estimated to have peaked in the mid-1980s, when approximately 7500 were known in the wild. Since then, numbers have declined. Logging has impacted on its habitat and range. Devastatingly, the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009 burned around 45% of its remaining habitat. There is now estimated to be around 1500 Leadbeater’s Possums remaining and it may soon be admitted to the critically endangered list. To protect this species we must protect old growth forests.

Tribute to Toughie – by Matthew Stanfield

October 3, 2016October 16, 2018Leave a comment

When considering the ever-growing list of species driven to extinction by human activity, certain creatures inevitably tend to stand out in the mind. Dodos are the most obvious example, having come to symbolise the Sixth Mass Extinction; the Passenger pigeon is another, plummeting from millions to none over a single human lifespan; the Thylacine would be a third, living on as a spectral icon of Tasmania’s threatened wildernesses.

Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog seems an unlikely candidate for the pantheon of iconic human-induced extinctions. It was neither large, averaging no more than four inches long, nor particularly colourful, being primarily mottled-brown. To human eyes, it might seem small, slimy and strange.

Despite this, it would be entirely wrong to adopt a dismissive attitude towards this now vanished species. It bears repeating that few treated Dodos, Passenger pigeons or Thylacines with any respect whilst they still lived. Even more importantly, an anthropocentric approach to assessing the worth of species is at the root of today’s extinction crisis.

Here then will be written a tribute to Economiohyla rabborum, the Rabbs’ fringed-limbed tree frog.

A mere eleven years separate the species’ discovery and its extinction. This bleak fact was not lost on Joseph R. Mendelson III of the Department of Herpetology at Zoo Atlanta. Mendelson was part of the expedition to central Panama which first bought Rabbs’ tree frog to the attention of science. He has described himself as a “Forensic Taxonomist”, since the amphibians which he works on describing are dying off almost as fast as he can name them. Reading his reflections upon the morbid aspect which his scientific career has taken on, Mendelson’s sense of loss can be acutely felt.

The Panama expedition was launched as a direct response to extinction, specifically to the ongoing spread of chytridiomycosis amongst amphibian populations. This fungal infection can inflict a one-hundred per cent mortality rate amongst infected amphibians, letting it destroy entire species. Its origins, at least in its most virulent form, remain unclear. The introduction of fungus-infected African clawed frogs to the Americas, in combination with climate change, is currently the prime suspect.

In 2004, the chytrid pathogen was confirmed present in central Panama. The following year, Mendelson and other scientists headed to the region to find amphibians and take them into captive safe-keeping before chytridiomycosis could eradicate them.

There within the cloud forests of the mountains above El Valle de Antón, Rabbs’ tree frog was discovered. Unlike so many of the species which human activity has condemned to death, Rabbs’ tree frog was observed in the wild. As with other members of its genus, Rabb’s tree frog could use the webbing on its hands and limbs to glide through the air from the canopy down to the forest floor. Uniquely amongst known amphibians, it was the males who took the responsibility for feeding the young. Wild males were seen staying with the developing eggs and occasionally inserting themselves into the mass of growing tadpoles, letting their offspring feed off scraps of their skin.

Several dozen Rabbs’ tree frogs, adults and tadpoles alike, were loaded into crates and sent from Panama to US facilities in the hope of saving the species via captive breeding. Among the adult frogs was a young male, later known as ‘Toughie’. He was destined to become the very last of his kind.

Toughie spent most of his life at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, ensconced inside a converted shipping container known as the FrogPOD. This biosecure structure is strictly off-limits to visitors and was designed to serve as an ark for critically endangered amphibians, including Rabbs’ tree frogs.

At first he had company. The captured tadpoles were the first to die, failing to metamorphose in their new surroundings. They were followed by Toughie’s own offspring, born in captivity and dying as tadpoles. In 2008, Rabb’s tree frog was scientifically described. By the end of the following year, the species was functionally extinct. The last known female, one of Toughie’s FrogPOD companions, died taking any hope of the frogs’ survival with her. For the next seven years, Toughie would live alone. After three years, his loneliness became absolute, when the only other Rabbs’ tree frog known to exist was euthanized at another US zoo.

Around this time, Toughie came by his name. It was given him by the young son of the Garden’s Amphibian Conservation Co-ordinator. The boy’s explanation for the frog’s moniker was simple: ‘Because he’s the only one that made it!’

Unfortunately for Toughie and his carers, “making it” can seldom have been a more hollow triumph. Despite the best efforts of concerned scientists, all attempts to eke out a future for the Rabbs’ tree frog had ended with nothing more than an old male, sitting alone in a hollow log with nothing ahead of his species but oblivion.

Whilst comfortable, Toughie’s final home was not large enough for him to glide as he might have done in the Panamanian cloud forests. Judging by the accounts of those who knew him best, he was a wilful frog who disliked being handled, frequently pinching the hands of those who tried to hold him. Thus, apart from his weekly weighings, he was left largely undisturbed.

For most of his life, Toughie was very much the strong and silent type, living on grouchily as his species faded from existence around him. In the wild, male Rabbs’ tree frogs were heard calling, even after chytridiomycosis crept into their forest refuge. In captivity, Toughie fell mute. None of his kind would hear his voice again.

On December 15^th 2014, something remarkable happened. The last Rabbs’ tree frog on Earth began to call out from his tank in the FrogPOD. His deep barking was recorded by the Amphibian Conservation Co-ordinator at the Botanical Garden. Once, such sounds might have been considered a mating call. From Toughie, they are the death rattle of a species.

Conservative current estimates suggest any given species of terrestrial vertebrate might expect to exist for one million years. How long Rabbs’ tree frog had lasted prior to September 2016 is as yet unknown. Had they managed merely one per cent of the aforementioned million years though, the frogs would still comfortably pre-date the entire written history of the species whose activities eradicated them.

More than seven thousand amphibian species share our planet. At least two thousand are in imminent danger of extinction. To get a sense of the scale of this crisis, consider that the last common ancestor of all of modern amphibians lived two-hundred-and-fifty million years ago. Staggeringly this means that the cumulative individual years of evolution which went into producing today’s IUCN Red List of amphibians runs well into the billions. This may seem unbelievable yet the great apes alone, with just seven living species, have well over thirty million years of individual evolution between us.

Should we lose all those amphibians which until so recently kept company with Toughie on the endangered list, we stand to lose a living record of evolutionary time greater than the age of the Earth itself. That is what mass extinction means.

Monolithic as the above figures are, they are arguably too big to effectively convey what species loss represents. For that, Toughie’s first and last recorded calls may serve far more eloquently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yrobDYyOBI

(The call of the last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog, recorded by Mark Mandica, Amphibian Conservation Co-ordinator at Atlanta Botanical Garden)

Dedicated to the memory of Toughie and all his kind before him.

By Matthew Stanfield

Bronx Zoo, Alexis Rockman, 2013

October 2, 2016October 16, 2018Leave a comment

Alexis Rockman travelled to Tasmania in search of the thylacine in 2004. His paintings made using soil from thylacine habitat are featured elsewhere on the Lost Species Day blog. Alexis is a prolific and ferocious painter who has kindly given RDLS permission to share his extraordinary epic oil painting Bronx Zoo here. You can read a conversation about art in the ‘age of pessimism’ between Alexis and his colleague Mark Dion here.

Wired review of Bronx Zoo:

“The monumental painting Bronx Zoo, 2012-2013, measuring 7 x 14 feet, depicts with virtuosity and wit an anarchistic scene amid the ruins of New York’s most legendary zoo, founded in 1899. The zoo’s neoclassic buildings and court have been overtaken by animals that inhabit it. Although human figures are absent in Rockman’s painting, their existence is implied by the decay of their buildings and the debris of their society. Bronx Zoo suggests the savage moment that occurs at the intersection of human culture and the natural world. To the artist, the zoo is “the last bastion for biodiversity,” a place for protecting and conserving those animals whose natural habitat has been destroyed. This dystopian narrative expands the visual language and scope of traditional natural history painting into themes of contemporary relevance, most prominently the environment.”

See the full article in Wired.

Thylacines in the Bronx – by Madeleine Thompson

October 1, 2016October 16, 2018Leave a comment

Between 1902 and 1919, the Bronx Zoo exhibited four thylacines. They were housed in the fox dens, which were near where the Dancing Crane is now.

In 1902, William Hornaday, first director of the Bronx Zoo, turned down a pregnant thylacine, which would have been the first to be shown in the United States. It went to the National Zoo and promptly gave birth. Henry Fairfield Osborn (paleontologist and president of the American Museum of Natural History) was unhappy about the missed opportunity, and Hornaday bought the next available thylacine for $125. On December 17, 1902, the Bronx Zoo obtained this thylacine, a male, from the animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck. In doing so, it became one of seven zoos outside of Australia and the second in the US (behind the National Zoo) to hold the species. The thylacine died on August 15, 1908.

The Bronx Zoo received a second male on January 26, 1912. Conflicting reports suggest that it came from either the Beaumaris Zoo in Tasmania or from the London Zoo. According to that year’s Annual Report, “while it arrived in good health, it was so nervous and unreconciled to captivity that it lived only a few months,” and died on November 20. A third, unsexed individual arrived at the Bronx Zoo on November 7, 1916 from Sydney dealer Ellis S. Joseph. It arrived in poor health and died seven days later. The fourth and final animal was a female who arrived on July 14, 1917. She had been purchased by Ellis from the Beaumaris Zoo and resold to the Bronx Zoo. She died on September 13, 1919.

Upon viewing a Bronx Zoo thylacine during a visit, the director of the Melbourne Zoo, W. H. LeSouef, told Hornaday: “I advise you to take excellent care of that specimen; for when it is gone, you never will get another. The species soon will be extinct.” Hornaday included this quote in his Our Vanishing Wildlife (1913) in a section on “Species of Large Mammals Almost Extinct.” In a later section of the book on the importance of wildlife preserves, Hornaday affirmed: “The extermination of the thylacine would be a zoological calamity; but it is impending.”

With many thanks to Madeleine Thompson at the Wildlife Conservation Society based at the Bronx Zoo (New York) for compiling this information. Thanks to the WCS for sharing with us these photographs taken of a thylacine at the Bronx Zoo in 1903.

All images © Wildlife Conservation Society. Shared by permission of the WCS Archives.

The Last of Many Breeds – by Nick Hunt

September 28, 2016October 16, 2018Leave a comment

Lily McInnes remembers the day when Donald James Eiger arrived at the zoo – top-hatted, tweed-suited, swinging his cane – and purchased the last of the thylacines for the sum of forty pounds. The beast had been caught in the Florentine Valley three years previously, and had spent its time in captivity pacing and yawning, yawning and pacing, occasionally making a futile leap at the bars and rebounding off them. The zookeepers hated it. It made the other animals nervous, they said – put them off their feed. Visitors steered away from it, preferring the monkeys and the bears, exotic things from foreign lands, not this local pestilence. You wouldn’t pay to see rabid dogs or rats exhibited in a cage, so why give money for a sight like that? Yawning and pacing, pacing and yawning, grinning its sheep-murdering grin. The last of its kind, it would never breed – would never produce lucrative offspring to recompense the zoo for the cost of its sustenance and upkeep. All it did in captivity was what it had done in its habitat – consume a small fortune in meat at the tax-payer’s expense. If Mr Eiger hadn’t made his offer they’d probably have put the thing down, and flung the carcass in the trash with the zoo’s other scrapings.

No-one knew why he wanted it, but no-one knew why Mr Eiger did most of the things he did. A trim, skinny man of advanced years, who dressed like a dandy but never was known to frequent any restaurant, dinner or dance, he was sighted now and then around town, engaged in unknowable business. His money was made in timber, they said – blackwood, blue gum, Huon pine – though some believed he also had dealings with coal, bauxite, gold. He was rumoured to be a mad millionaire, but both his madness and his millions were probably exaggerated. He was certainly rich and strange, and that was enough for Hobart.

Lily, nine years old, watched him arrive in a taxicab and shake begloved hands with the zoo’s director. The two men advanced to the thylacine’s cage and spent twenty minutes smoking cigars, conversing in low, amenable tones, while the beast stalked back and forwards. Then the head keeper – Lily’s father – entered the cage with a bucket of meat which he liberally slopped upon the floor, and while the thylacine’s jaws were engaged bagged its head, collared its neck, muzzled its mouth, strapped its legs and fastened it to a length of chain, the end of which he presented to Mr Eiger with a flourish. Three other men half-dragged, half-carried the struggling thing to the taxicab, where it was pinned against the floor by Simon, Mr Eiger’s butler.

‘They christened it Benjamin, by the way,’ said the zoo’s director, again shaking hands. An envelope had been exchanged. ‘That’s what the papers chose.’

But Mr Eiger shook his head. ‘A thing like that needs no name.’

The taxicab left, and Lily watched. It was a blue summer day. She looked back at the empty cage, at her father sweeping up the meat. He turned his head and met her eye. ‘No tears now,’ he said.

***

There were different stories told. The house was high upon the hill, overlooking the city and the bay, and not many visitors went to it – but still, the stories travelled. People said it was loose inside the house, that he permitted it to prowl, that it had made a stinking nest in the corner of Simon’s bedroom. That it had eaten several cats. That Mr Eiger had shot the cats. That constables had visited. That delivery men refused to visit. That Genevieve Eiger, his delicate and perennially ailing English wife, had suffered from ‘nervous fits’ of some kind and been taken to the hospital. That she might be away for some time. That the servants had departed with her.

There were other stories too. That he was trying to breed the thing. That bitches in heat – dingos, strays – had been brought to the house in recent months and left in a room with the thylacine, but the only thing that remained the next day was bones and scraps of fur. Some said he had taught the brute some tricks – it would yawn on demand when he said ‘sleep tight’, or fall with its belly in the air when he made a pistol sound. Others believed he had taken its teeth. That he beat it with a bamboo cane, starved it in an airless box, that his ambition was to break its spirit as one breaks a horse’s. A gardener from the house next door swore he heard its yowls at night, rasps of fury, screams of pain – and afterwards, the quieter noise of Mr Eiger weeping.

It was strictly not allowed but Lily climbed the hill one day, a half-hour walk from school, into the rich people’s neighbourhood, and spied through the iron gate. She could see the big house with its pillars and porch, its gardens dark with Tasmanian oak, but she couldn’t see the beast. She wondered if it was dead somehow. If Mr Eiger had punished too far. Perhaps he had stuffed it, or stretched its tiger-striped skin before his fire.

She stared through the gate for a long while hoping for the truth to come, but no sound, no sign, no shadow came from behind the blank square windows. She walked to the zoo to meet her dad, fibbing that school had kept her late. She passed the thylacine’s old cage. An ocelot was there now.

***

And then there were older tales. Tales from before Lily’s time. Tales from before Mr Eiger’s time, if you counted the years back, but tales that Lily nevertheless believed were connected, somehow. She pictured him as a younger man, uniformed, slouch-hatted, rifle snapped in the crook of his arm, on horseback. On a moonless night. The Black War was long since won but some of the tribes had escaped the Line and continued to live by stealing sheep, haunting lonely stations. Punitive raids on recalcitrant blacks happened in the dead of night, and when they fled their camp fires the raiding squads pursued for days – often using native trackers tamed by money, whisky, church – picking them off with long-range shots from higher ground, from ridges. Like shooting wallabies or cats. This work was rewarded. The ones not shot were rounded up, chained from neck to neck to neck, and marched in dragging, dusty lines to Flinders Island, Oyster Cove, where they were taught to wear clothes and live in proper houses. People crowded their doors to watch as the captured blacks paraded past – naked legs, ragged beards, scowling, glistening like apes – an obstacle to settlement, a taint, a dying breed.

Lily had never seen a black. She wanted to, and feared to. Sometimes when she closed her eyes she saw them like a picture show, heads bagged, long limbs chained, in moving lines across the earth. She was too young to remember that. But when she stood at the thylacine’s cage, which contained no thylacine, somehow she remembered.

***

Then the territory was clear, the settlement was won. Frontier families slept without fear of a waddy staving in the door, a spear crashing through the wall. It was a new century. The Irish came, the Cockneys came, the Welsh came, the Germans came. Sealers, whalers, timber-men. Pastures for a million sheep. Rare earth metals, bauxite, gold. The forests splintered to the crash of Huon pine and myrtle.

***

Sheep were found with their throats ripped out. Ribcages that buzzed with flies. Something else was out there now. The farmers checked their guns again. New rewards were offered.

***

A five pound bounty for a black. One pound for a thylacine. Demand outstripped supply.

***

Three years went by, and Lily grew. Her dad retired from the zoo – he suffered from arthritic joints – and found work on the trams instead. The work was less demanding, and you didn’t catch fleas from trams. Hobart’s streets were widened, paved. Elegant parks were laid, with eucalyptus rustling. There were streetlights and hotels, more automobiles, fewer horses. Lily’s older sister Ruth married, moved to New South Wales. Her brother Sam enlisted in the Royal Tasmania Regiment and was sent to Europe to fight. Another war was starting.

Genevieve Eiger died and the rich people went to her funeral, though most had never been acquainted. Mr Eiger’s beard turned white. He was seldom seen in town. People called him a ‘recluse’ and Lily didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded coarse and strange. A bit like ‘loon’. A bit like ‘loose’. There were rumours of a fight – that Mr Eiger, mindless drunk, had flung Simon’s clothes and books from a top-floor window in a thunderstorm, or even attacked him with his cane. Reluctantly, so they said, the butler packed his bags.

Sometimes she thought of the thylacine. It was distant now. She had a picture in her mind, but she didn’t know if it was right. A striped backside, a cavernous grin, pointed ears like a dog’s – but other than that its distinctions blurred, its features ran together.

No-one talked about it now. Perhaps it had only been a silly story told at parties.

***

Two more years. The food got less. Lily watched the troops parade in Macquarie Street, hung with flags – uniformed, slouch-hatted, with rifles snapped in the crooks of their arms. The men looked strong and brave and clean. The air raid sirens yowled at night. The Japanese were in Hong Kong, Malaya, Burma, Singapore. Perhaps the Dutch East Indies next. After that, Australia. Lily had never seen a Jap. She wanted to, and feared to. Now when she closed her eyes she saw them, at great distances – she picked them off one by one from horseback in her mind.

***

In the middle of that war, Mr Eiger left the house. Lily wasn’t there to see – she learned the legends later.

It was dawn, and he rode a white mare. His silk top hat was at a tilt. He carried a rifle on his back, a waddy in his hand.

They said the beast stalked at his side, or strained ahead on a length of chain. That its flanks flashed in the light – orange black, orange black. That its sheep-destroying teeth gleamed in its yawning skull.

Man, horse and beast passed quickly through the suburbs of the rich and were glimpsed from outlying farms making their way towards the bush. They disappeared, people said, in the woods beyond Mount Wellington. A farmer named Eli Church claimed to have seen them passing by, pausing at a billabong. The horse ate grass, the man drank wine and the beast consumed red chunks of meat, tossed from a battered leather bag. The meat did not last long.

The constables knocked at the big house, and received no answer. Having forced the door they searched the rooms and reported that nothing was amiss, not a teaspoon out of place. The fireplace was swept and stacked. The marble floors were freshly mopped. Just empty rooms and an open cage – but even that was clean and scrubbed. No clues, just an absence.

***

Lily McInnes is an old woman now, and she retells the stories. Her grandchildren have heard her talk of bunyips, yowies, flightless birds, forgotten tribes of wild men, though these are only fairytales. But sometimes she tells about the man who might be glimpsed on moonless nights, backcountry, deep within the bush. They do not like this tale so much, but she tells it anyway. Lily changes as she talks. He slaughters sheep, he catches cats. Mad-eyed, he swings a bamboo cane. With tiger stripes across his skin. Upon his head a crown of jaws, hinged open in an endless yawn. No bounty will bring this one in. He is the last of many breeds. The farmers say they’ll shoot on sight, until his extirpation.

Banged up – a short story by Caroline Hunt

September 27, 2016October 16, 2018Leave a comment

It was a cat B prison. He was in C block. I’ll call him Dave, but that wasn’t his name. He was inside for twelve years, so he must have done something serious.

“Twelve do six miss if I keep out of trouble.”

Nobody came to visit him so he requested an OPV – a prison visitor. I went there once a week. I sat in his cell on level 4. Always next to the open door, those were my security instructions. The prison officer on the corridor checked us at intervals.

“Alright Dave?”

“OK Miss?”

We talked about his favourite food, brands of trainers, and different ways to hang yourself. Once he tried to con me.

“You’re a bit of an environmentalist aren’t you miss?”

“Yes I am.”

“My brother on the outside’s starting an environmental magazine.”

“Oh that’s good.”

“Fancy contributing?”

“How do I do that?”

“We could set up a regular subscription if you give me your bank details.”

I gave him a look.

He didn’t ask again.

The last thylacine, aka the Tasmanian tiger, was trapped in 1933. They called him Benjamin. He wasn’t a tiger, he was a carnivorous marsupial. He had a dense soft yellow brown coat striated by stripes down his back and tail, a large blunt head out of proportion to his body, and short rounded ears. Hobart Zoo was his nick. He was inside for for life, if you could call it that. He only survived three years.

Dave always made me a cup of tea. He kept the milk on the window sill to stop it going off. He wasn’t lucky enough to get prison work in the pot pourri factory and education had been cut for of lack of funds, so he was banged up in his cell twenty-three hours a day. There was an hour for evening association when he could get a shower and mix with the inmates on the wing. He spent the other twenty-three pacing his cell or staring at the walls. On his block there were incidents of self-harm, mental illness and suicide.

Benjamin was a lifer, sentenced for thieving sheep, though he wasn’t to know it was a crime. No association for him. He was a top predator. I watched the film footage of him pacing his cell. It was about the same size as Dave’s. With obsessive pathetic hope he searched for escape. He scented the air, he gauged the spaces between the bars of his cage, he checked the walls, he yawned in tension. Then he started again, up and down, never resting, never giving up.

When Dave couldn’t sleep he imagined he was walking round Upton Lovell, the village he came from.

“You turn right off the A36 just after the Knook Army camp and keep going down the hill past a few cottages till you get to the Prince Leopold. I nip in there for an hour – have a couple of pints, chat to my mates – I can see it like I was in it miss. If you follow the road left and go over the level crossing you come to a housing estate. That’s where my house is. I walk past it every night”

When Benjamin slept I hope he dreamed and his dreams gave him the escape he searched for. That in his mind he was able to run again in the dense forests, shelter in his nests of bark and ferns, and revisit his pups in their lair high up in the caves where they waited for his yip yap bark when he returned with his criminal booty of a farmer’s sheep.

“There’s a path through the graveyard by the church. Cross the bridge over the River Wylie and you can walk in the water meadows on the other side. There’s all butterflies and flowers and cattle grazing. You’d like it there, you being an environmentalist – beautiful it is miss.”

The next time I reported in at the gate he’d gone.

“Prisoner DD4328?”

“Transferred last night.”

I felt a sense of loss.

“Where to?”

“Can’t tell you that miss.”

Benjamin died of neglect, shut out of his shelter with no escape from the freezing nights and the scorching days. His body was carelessly flung on a scrap heap. The thylacine species was officially declared extinct in 1982. Official protection for his species was offered fifty-nine days before Benjamin died in captivity. His relations were found in fossil form. His ancestors were painted as rock art 40,000 years ago. He was the last to leave. His kind is lost forever by a random act of carelessness.

There have been reports of an occasional sighting. A cry heard in the hills at dusk, a dog-like beast caught in a car’s headlights, but they remain unconfirmed.

Image: Thylacine Ghost VII (Skeleton) by Gabbee Stolp

Extinction Symbol

September 21, 2016October 16, 2018Leave a comment

Why create a symbol for extinction? An interview with the designer:

“As you may have already heard by now, a mass extinction of plant and animal species is currently underway which is being caused by human activity. It was felt that the realm of visual culture hadn’t yet responded adequately to this situation, and so the extinction symbol was created as a way to distill a complex concept into an easily recognisable graphic image which transcends language differences and can be quickly and easily replicated by anybody in a range of mediums and regardless of artistic ability. The circle represents the planet, and the hourglass indicates that time is rapidly running out for many species, including humans.

“This is a decentralised, strictly non-commercial participatory project that people can use to express their concerns about the extinction crisis. The aim is to raise awareness and act as a continual reminder to people who see it as they move around the city that their actions at any given moment could potentially have far-reaching effects. Thus it serves as a visual confrontation/admonishment to those who indulge in the hyper-consumerist lifestyle and who are presently estranged or insulated from the consequences of this, due to living in almost entirely artificial urban environments. The very presence of the symbol in public space promotes a cultural shift away from the current destructive paradigm, while also signalling an increasingly emergent resistance movement. Hopefully by having the message constantly reinforced, it becomes impossible to ignore.

“By autonomously creating a physical manifestation of the symbol, a person automatically becomes a member of the extinction symbol collective, and in the process states their refusal to remain a passive bystander. Curiosity is stimulated in those who randomly come across the symbol and might initially be unaware of the meaning behind it, potentially leading to further investigation and exploration of the issues involved. Examples of the symbol seen in public are shared via various social media channels, and a space for discourse opened up. On an individual level, people taking part in the project have reported that creating the symbol can help to lessen the feelings of powerlessness and alienation endemic to techno-industrial society.

“Your participation is welcomed and encouraged. Please create the symbol everywhere you can.”

The symbol can be downloaded freely from http://www.extinctionsymbol.info/

Benjamin – a short story by Matthew Stanfield

September 19, 2016October 16, 2018Leave a comment

Loopus from katy shepherd on Vimeo.

“Loopus’ film shared with permission from Katy Shepherd.

Hobart had been a disappointment to David Fleay. He had come to Tasmania from the mainland with high hopes and exceptional credentials for a man still three years shy of thirty. The Tasmanian Museum had been his first port of call: a schizophrenic sort of a place to look at, French chateau from the front, prison block from the back. Fitting for Tasmania, David had thought on his way in. Would that I had been, he had thought on his way out. The Directorship of the Tasmanian Museum, a post which he had so coveted, was denied him by the Museum Board on account of his youth.

In truth the Directorship had only ever been a means to an end. For most mainlanders Tasmania was an afterthought; for David it was an obsession. In the wake of his rejection he had found himself inconsolable. It should have been me, it had to be me. This is what I was born for.

All was not entirely lost though – a bastard sort of an opportunity yet remained to Fleay. And so he found himself on the nineteenth of December 1933, trudging up a scrubby hill in the summer heat to visit a zoo. He carried the ungainly weight of two cameras but he scarcely minded. Within the wrought iron boundary fence of Hobart Zoo, David slowed his pace. He turned each corner carefully, wanting time to prepare himself. His heart was pounding as he passed the lion terraces and the polar bear’s pond. He sidestepped the translucent bulk of an acrid-smelling bird cage, feeling every hair on his body rise. There it was, all at once. It was almost too much.

Even behind six-foot-high walls of windblown chicken wire, Fleay realised that the old bushmen’s tales he had heard were true. I sense it, I feel it within its cage. The Thylacine.

David Fleay knew animals. He knew them better than any white man in Australia, he had been told. At twenty-seven he was a veteran of countless natural history treatises and dissections. Once or twice though, he had encountered something in his subjects which defied quantification or diagramming. It had happened the first time he held a platypus, as a nature-mad boy in Victoria. This was more potent still. The Thylacine had a presence to it, which intensified the nearer he drew to the cage.

‘His name’s Benjamin,’ said a man in a waistcoat, with a little terrier dog at his side, ‘And you must be Mister Flea…’

David didn’t even think to correct him. All that he could concentrate on was getting past the wire, where there would be nothing to separate him from Benjamin.

Someone is new in this territory which is not mine, but which I know better than the one I have lost. A new smell, an intruder. What does he hide beneath that black cloth?

Inside the cage, Fleay found himself understanding why the early colonists had found it so hard to settle on a name for Thylacines. The animal before him looked in many ways very like a large dog, yet in just as many ways utterly unlike one. The visual character of the creature seemed fluid, shifting with each unhurried step it took. Now it becomes the Native Hyena, now the Zebra Opossum and now the Tasmanian Tiger. David wondered if this shifting was a trick of the European eye, or if it was somehow innate and fluidity was a trait of the species, passed down through generations.

For all Benjamin’s liminality there was also a singularity to him. The Thylacine’s presence, even in such mean and meagre surrounds, was ample justification of his scientific name. Thylacinus: the “pouched one”, the marsupial ne plus ultra. Hurriedly, Fleay began to set up his film equipment.

I see you. I watch you. Try me.

David Fleay began to film Benjamin. Silver halide, sheathed in gelatine and smeared across acetate, began to react to the sunlight filtering through Fleay’s lens. Light and darkness, motion and stillness, all would be captured. Thylacine shadows.

Nothing in Fleay’s first reel was darker than the Thylacine’s eyes though. Huge and black they were, blacker than any dog’s despite their quasi-canid setting. The darkness of Benjamin’s eyes left his stares open to interpretation and their truth inscrutable.

The man on the other side of the fence seemed nervous. He picked up a wooden paling and began tapping on the wire fence with it, hoping to catch Benjamin’s attention.

The intruder seems unmoved. The other one is agitated, as usual. That one makes so much noise, I wish he would stop but what can I do? I know what the two-legged beasts are capable of. My scar is my reminder. This quiet one though, this peculiar intruder, he is different. What does he intend?

When it came time to shoot the second reel, David could hardly believe that he was looking at the same animal. Benjamin had finally taken an interest in the waistcoated man’s piece of paling. Seen side-on in the afternoon sunlight, the Thylacine’s very stripes took on a new aspect. The pale fawn fur between the chocolate brown came to the fore as if the animal were dark-coated with light stripes. He is no more a true tiger than a true dog, Fleay mused.

Benjamin reared up angrily on his hind legs, roused by the incessant tapping of wood on wire. Standing as he did, the Thylacine’s head was fully five feet off the ground. In spite of the cage which circumscribed the creature, his vitality was unmistakeable. A line from the new American film, King Kong, which David had seen at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Ballarat sprang unbidden to mind. He was a king and a god in the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization merely a captive.

That four-legged one, so alike but yet so different. Such a false creature, whichever coat you wear. I have seen you set upon my own kind. Leave me be. I will not suffer your presence here.

The nearness of the little terrier to the chicken wire barrier was irritating to Benjamin, Fleay perceived. ‘Mister Reid, call your dog to heel would you please?’ David asked the waistcoated man. Reid did as he was requested and Fleay returned to his filmmaking.

With the dog having retreated, Benjamin visibly calmed. He paced about his one-hundred-fifty square foot domain of bare concrete. At certain angles, there was something of the native devil or the tiger quoll about the Thylacine. That said, for all the uniqueness and beauty of those two species, Fleay felt Benjamin occupied another order of magnitude, not just in size but in his very manner. The spirit of the Thylacine, for want of a more scientific word, was altogether apart from the other marsupial carnivores of Australia. Such is the way with apex predators and so it is with Benjamin.

The intruder hides behind his tool. He makes himself vulnerable. I will defend what remains to me. I will defend what little remains of me.

Benjamin opened his mouth wide and hissed at Fleay. No, not wide. Wide is not a big enough word. The Thylacine’s lower jaw seemed to hang independent of the rest of his skull, like a reddish-pink pharaonic beard grafted to the underside of his snout.

This was the first and last sound which David would hear from Benjamin. The Thylacine’s bite came quickly, as David knelt behind his camera. It was not terribly hard, though he knew his arse cheek would bleed through his trousers. It felt more like an announcement than an attack. Here I am – this is my place not yours. Queerly, it felt almost like an honour. Fleay found himself thinking of grey-bearded King George tapping men on the shoulder with his sword to make knights of the realm.

Fleay did not leave the cage immediately after being bitten, turning a deaf ear to the entreaties of Mister Reid. He took several photographs of Benjamin, who gave no further indication of hostility towards the human interloper.

My kind have never harmed yours without repercussion. Yet you did not retaliate. Who are you, stranger?

David shot one last snippet of film that afternoon. Benjamin sat sphinx-like and stared straight into the camera lens. At that moment, the indefinite nature of the Thylacine coalesced into something unmistakeable. Fleay felt the blackness of Benjamin’s eyes yield up an unadulterated emotion.

Loneliness. I am alone, utterly, pitiably unique. That snare killed me. Only now do I see that.

Within three years of David Fleay’s visit, Benjamin breathed his last. On the seventh of September 1936, his body was sent to the Tasmanian Museum. It met the same fate as Fleay’s application: refused by the Museum Board.

In 1935, Fleay was granted official permission to obtain a pair of Thylacines. His intention was to breed them in captivity. David would quite likely have succeeded in this endeavour, considering that he went on to make his name by captive breeding dozens of species for the very first time.

It was an event triggered halfway across the world that put paid to Fleay’s dream. The Great Depression forced him to wait until 1945 to go in search of Thylacines. He found traces of them, but Benjamin was to prove the first and last of his kind whom David Fleay would see with his own eyes. Funds dwindled again and the last, best hope of saving the Thylacine went with them.

Three of David Fleay’s short films survive from the nineteenth of December 1933. In total, their black-and-white silence runs to two minutes and thirty-one seconds. Each of these films individually is longer than all other known footage of captive Thylacines combined. There is no known footage of wild Thylacines.

Fleay’s grainy clips of Benjamin represent perhaps the most detailed scientific study of a living Thylacine ever undertaken.

Born naked and blind amongst mist and ferns, a son of our last redoubt. In time I crept from living shelter, the last to leave. I learned to feed, to speak, to hunt. I lived and loved beneath the trees. One by one, it came undone. The coldness of the hard new vines. The bite on the ankle. Canned fire at the command of a beast. Again, I was the last to leave, with raw dead wood on every side.

You may believe that I lived on in that place, but I know the truth. I was lost long before I arrived. If your kind must keep me for a memory, remember this.

You saw me dead.

But first I lived.

In memory of the Thylacine

Remembrance Day For Lost Species

November 30th