Tigers in Our Chook Shed

By Matt Flynn

Do thylacines still roam the Tasmanian wilderness? A farmer who owns land bordering the wild south-west region says the answer is a definite yes. The first chapter describes a series of chicken shed raids by two thylacines in 2012. These events, along with eyewitness reports that have not stopped since the animal was declared extinct, demonstrate that the animal still exists in Tasmania. The author explains why hard evidence of the animal's existence has been impossible to acquire, and likely reasons why the species has not bounced back despite almost a century of legal protection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matt Flynn
• Release date: Sep 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463940266

Matt Flynn

A former resident of the remote and searing Northern Territory of Australia, now living in the remote and freezing far south of Tasmania. A bewildered thylacine enthusiast, and father of two.

Book preview

tigers in our chook shed

ISBN: 9780463940266 Copyright 2020 Matt Flynn.

This book is regularly updated with new information, including new chapters. Buyers receive updated editions, which include more biological and historical thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) information, and the latest thylacine developments on the island. If you wish to obtain immediate updates, buy the official version here … https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1041241

In 2017, Colin Carlson, an ecologist who modelled the extinction risk for species, published a paper in Conservation Biology that placed the likelihood of the thylacine still surviving at 1 in 1.6 trillion.

Contents

1 - Year of the thylacines

2 - Facts

3 - Reactions

4 - Crazy talk

5 - To the sceptics

6 - Afterwards

7 - Recent reports

8 - Pre-1830 descriptions

9 - Terror in the Huon

10 - Thoughts

11 - Photos

12 - Getting proof

13 - Where did they go?

14 - Boffins

15 - Ridicule

16 - The truth

17 - Still behaving badly

18 - Further reading

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Chapter 1 – Year of the thylacines

For a short period in 2012 two thylacines hunted on our family farm in southern Tasmania.

One of the animals was raiding a chicken coop near our bedroom.

Early white settlers described a yip-yip call the Tasmanian hyenas made while hunting.

The animals were known to hunt in pairs.

The double-yip is the call we heard, very clearly, near the house, as the coop-raider began running up the hill.

A second animal, located higher up, called back in the same manner.

No other Tasmanian animal makes the double-yip, and certainly none that raid chicken coops.

Make no mistake, the call was not some ambiguous animal noise in the night.

The thylacine was near the house and its call was loud.

The sound was highly unusual, obviously from an animal of some substance.

The second call, from up the hill, was more feeble, either a result of distance, or possibly from a smaller animal.

It was the first of at least three visits around the same period, when these animals came in the night and stole our chickens.

I live with my family in the upper settled part of the Huon Valley, in southern Tasmania.

We moved to the farm in late 2011, having previously lived in Australia's Northern Territory.

The 57-acre farm is mostly cleared pasture, with a large area of thick forest and a well vegetated gully that splits into two parts.

It is a relatively secluded spot.

Our boundary backs onto forest that extends through to Tasmania's great south-west wilderness.

Just west is the remote Weld Valley, and north of the Weld is the Florentine, possibly where the last thylacine was trapped in the 1930s, although there is some dispute about where Hobart Zoo's last thylacine came from.

Our land is well populated with wildlife.

There are Bennetts wallabies, pademelons, bandicoots, wombats, echidnas, quolls, rabbits and other critters.

Wedge-tailed eagles glide overhead, white goshawks are occasional visitors, along with tawny frogmouths, splendid wrens, firetail finches, green rosellas, morepork owls and currawongs, among others.

The house was unoccupied for a short period before we arrived, and had been previously rented by people who were not using the land for farming.

The first livestock we bought were chickens. They bred and before long we had too many chickens.

I cut a hole in the corrugated iron wall at the rear of the chicken coop so the chooks could access the pasture to feed.

I didn't like letting them out the front of the coop to scratch around the garden because they pooed all over the