Comedy

Airports and wildlife have a complex relationship. The first human fatality from a wildlife strike occurred in 1912 when a pilot, deliberately “buzzing” a flock of gulls, collided with a bird that became entangled in the plane’s controls. Since then, wildlife has significantly influenced aviation safety, and vice versa. Airports, with their large, relatively undisturbed land areas, can unintentionally become biodiversity hotspots. For example, swards of grasses in European and North American airfields have been shown to be great nesting spots for declining farmland birds, and airport lights might attract foraging bats and other insectivores. Many airports now have biodiversity monitoring programs to track and manage wildlife. Hobart Airport is a prime example. It conducts regular camera trap monitoring to understand animal movements, promoting safety of both animals and passengers. As part of the Land for Wildlife program, the airport conserves critically endangered lowland Poa grasslands and threatened coastal saltmarsh.

Brushtail possums are the most adaptable and familiar of Aussie possums. While there are six subspecies spread across the country, their natural distribution has significantly declined in all states, with the exception of Tasmania where they continue to flourish.

Tasmanian brushies are characterised by their larger size, fluffier coat, and a higher frequency of black and blonde colour variations. Brushtail possums are well adapted to living in urban and suburban environments with their opportunistic diet, excellent climbing skills and the ability to use artificial structures like roof cavities and kitchen cupboards as denning sites. This often causes them to come into conflict with people and contributes to a misconception about their widespread prosperity in Australia. In reality, their population has contracted to areas of higher rainfall, resulting in their disappearance from large parts of Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

In the 1935 film “Werewolf of London,” Dr. Wilfred Glendon, a botanist, is bitten by a werewolf and thus cursed with lycanthropy, eventually transforming into a werewolf himself. Sadly, this is reminiscent of how the curse of Devil Facial Tumor Disease (DFTD) spreads among the Tasmanian devil population.

Devils often engage in aggressive social interactions, which include biting each other around the face and mouth. During the mating season, females actually develop a fat pad on the back of their neck that males will latch onto before dragging their mate into the den. When a devil infected with DFTD bites a healthy devil, the cancer cells can implant and grow in the new host. Thankfully, Lauren’s “werewolf” shows no signs of ill health. While DFTD remains highly lethal, recent reports of tumour regressions offer a glimmer of hope for the coexistence of devils and DFTD rather than outright extinction.

The distribution of brown bandicoots has shrunk dramatically since European colonisation. On the mainland, the southern and eastern subspecies are Endangered. However, they are commonly seen in and around Tasmanian suburbs and cities, even in busy parks and on popular dog beaches. SBBs are mostly nocturnal, building nests of shredded grasses in shallow depressions surrounded by dense vegetation where they rest during the day. Females typically have litters of two or three young. However, their late-lactation oestrus allows them to conceive again as soon as one litter is weaned, resulting in up to four litters per year! If a bandy is born early in the season, it could reach maturity and breed within the same year of its birth. This rapid reproductive rate only highlights the severity of their dissapearance from many Australian forests and woodlands. Have you ever captured bandicoots showing this trailing behaviour? Let us know.

Birds are dinosaurs. Specifically they belong to the bipedal theropods which includes species like T. rex. The earliest evidence for a species capable of powered flight, akin to how a bird flaps its wings, is the legendary Archaeopteryx, dating back 150 million years. Since its discovery in 1861, several other bird-like dinosaur fossils have been found like the four-winged, crow-sized, and very cute Anchiornis huxleyi (meaning “near bird”). When not awkwardly walking along the ground, wedgies use their impressive wingspan (1.9-2.3 m) to exploit thermal updrafts, soaring up to 2 km above ground in Tasmania. GPS tracking of 22 recently fledged eagles from across the state revealed a preference for rugged terrain during long-distance travel. This terrain generates orographic winds, where air masses are forced up or down by mountain slopes. For perching and short flights, wedgies favour ecotones where pastures meet woodlands, providing better vantage points and higher prey densities.