1936 TO PRESENT
(continued)
.
.
| A
thylacine at the Bronx Zoo in New York City, circa 1902. |
|
Snares set out for wallabies and possums were to be seen everywhere throughout
the empty forest. The expedition was told of how two brothers, in
a single winter, had set 2,000 snares. Poison had also been placed
about for the dasyurids, which would have otherwise attacked the defenseless,
snared victims. No thylacine tracks were found in any place where
snares were present. A. D. Ferguson, a ranger, said that he had witnessed
a thylacine the previous winter, and a road patrolman, M. Tiffin, described
how he had been sawing a hollowed tree 2½
years earlier, and a juvenile thylacine scurried out.
An attempt was made
to trap thylacines by towing trails of fresh meat about the Collingwood
Range, but failed. Fleay moved camp to Middle Dump Hut, near Calder's
Pass, upon the discovery of some promising tracks on Franklin Hill.
There, Fleay heard a strange cry, which "suggested the brief, sharp creak
of a door and was quite unlike any cry of a mammal or bird I have ever
heard" (Fleay 1946). The following month, they found some tracks
in fresh mud, and on Poverty Plain, it was thought that a thylacine had
taken a Bennet's wallaby (Macropus rufogriseus) from a trap, leaving
behind a tuft of its own fur. It apparently left tracks around the
traps over the next two days, but avoided them all. Soon afterward,
the expedition returned home. |
| In October
1957, Meldrum heard of an instance of three sheep killed in an unusual
manner on a farm in Derwent. There was no indication of there having
been a struggle, and the only parts consumed were the lower jaw, throat,
much of the face, and the turbinate bones. On an adjacent property,
a similar killing occurred, and later on the first property, a lamb had
its liver eaten but the face and throat were left intact. This was
not considered by Guiler and Meldrum (1958) to have been done by a Tasmanian
devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) due to the the "tidy" technique of
killing, the lack of a struggle, the fact that the predator did not come
back to the kill, and because although devils were common in the region,
they did not kill sheep. They did not believe that the killings were
the work of a dog either, because they expected that a dog would turn "killer"
after its success. However, this last conclusion becomes less convincing
when it is realized that a feral dog was later caught in the area (Griffith
et.
al. 1972). Footprints resembling those of a thylacine were discovered
however, and a neighboring property owner claimed to have seen a "tiger". |
.
| A
young thylacine photographed at the Hobart Zoo (Domain site) in 1933 by
Dr. David Fleay. |
|
An alleged thylacine
was followed by helicopter in 1957 at Birthday Bay, but inspection of the
resultant photograph showed that the animal was most likely a dog (Grzimek
1967).
.
| A
female thylacine at the London Zoo, 1931. |
|
A small party discovered tracks in January 1958 in the thick mud of the
Old Davey Track between Point Davey and Maydena. They were larger
than a devil's, had all four toes pointing forward, the claws were nearly
level with each other, and the pads of the hindfeet were far longer than
those of a dog. From a photograph, they were considered by Guiler
to be those of a thylacine (Muir 1961). Griffith (1972) mentions
that brief, unsuccessful searches for the thylacine were made in 1958 by
a Walt Disney film crew, and by Sir Edmund Hillary in 1960. However,
Smith (1982) notes that he was unable to find any additional references
to these expeditions. |
|
