Book Review: Lure Of The Thylacine by Col Bailey

By Mike Williams

Easily Col Bailey's best book so far, Lure Of the Thylacine is now out, the second of three planned books dedicated to the Thylacine. Get your copy HERE.

The passion and dedication that Col has put into this subject astounds me.

As engrossing as the stories are, what is perhaps the saddest thing is that they show you how ignorant people were, sometimes, in those days when they encountered these poor animals.

There are 64 punchy short chapters on Tiger encounters and stories, some that do end happily, at least for the tiger!

Professor Mike Archer has been so impressed with Col's work that he happily accepted the request to write a really thoughtful introduction.

Col's first book started when Col interviewed Reg Trigg back in 1980.

The tiger is still out there and the Lure Of The Thylacine will never go away.

The Tasmanian Tiger: Extinct or Extant? makes Top 20

Great news!

The Tasmanian Tiger: Extinct or Extant? has made Loren Coleman's Top 20 list of best cryptozoology books for 2014.

Cryptomundo recently featured a guest blog post by anthology editor Rebecca Lang:

The last Thylacine in captivity died on September 7, 1936, ironically just two weeks shy of the species receiving protection status. In 1986, 50 years later, it would be declared extinct. By international standards it no longer exists, and is just another marsupial ghost haunting the Australian landscape following European settlement.

While Benjamin is often symbolically referred to as ‘The Last Thylacine’, in all likelihood the species persisted in the Tasmanian wilderness well into the 1930s, possibly until the 1950s. In 1980 then-Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife officer Steven Smith conducted a detailed study of sightings between 1934 and 1980, concluding of the 320 sightings, just under half could be considered good, if inconclusive.

Judging by the thousands of sightings logged by government departments and private research groups since that time, however, it may still roam remote parts of Tasmania...

New Australian book queries Tasmanian Tiger extinction...

Does the Tasmanian Tiger still roam the island state, parts of the Australian mainland, and the northern land mass of Irian Jaya-Papua New Guinea? 

Despite being hunted to extinction in the early part of the 20th century, the Tasmanian Tiger continues to stalk the imaginations of people the world over. What's more, hundreds of reports of the striped dog-like marsupial with the fearsome gaping jaw are made each year in Australia. 

In The Tasmanian Tiger: Extinct or Extant?, biologists, geneticists, naturalists, and academics explore the evidence for and against the continuing existence of Thylacinus cynocephalus.

Featuring essays by Peter Chapple, Ned Terry, Col Bailey, Bob Paddle, Nick Mooney, Tony Healy, Paul Cropper, Andrew Pask, Malcolm Smith, Gary Opit and Michael Williams.

Tassie Tiger search attracts cranky critics

In November, the CFZ launched a project to find evidence for a surviving population of Thylacines in Tasmania, Australia.

A team of 10 – five from the UK, five from Australia – went ‘in search of’ the Tasmanian Tiger, the first of several planned expeditions over a two-year period.

While we’ve had a few bouquets and ‘good onyas’, we’ve also received a few brickbats and nasty asides, which is mildly amusing all things considered.

We've even spent some time in the past few days directly responding to some of these ill-founded criticisms.

So here are the general criticisms and our responses to them, to save us time, as we won’t be visiting every cyber bolthole to personally respond to critics or address inaccuracies.

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Criticism: It was a success, when clearly it wasn’t.

We never claimed it was! Put it down to journalistic licence – not everything you read is going to be verbatim, folks.

The journalist made the quote up (Wow, really? Never!). Her original question was “So it wasn’t a roaring success, was it?” His reply: “If you judge the word success as having a body or video of the animal as success, then no, our trip was not a success, but it was successful in that we collected many recent eyewitness statements and some scat for analysis.” (Not verbatim, but you get the drift.)

This trip is merely the first stage in a series of largely self-funded trips to be conducted over the next two years to gauge whether there is sufficient evidence of the Thylacine’s survival.

You can read our aims here: http://www.cfzaustralia.com/2013/10/toyota-backs-biggest-search-yet-for.html

Criticism: You created the perception that outsiders (outside Tasmania, that is) are coming to solve the mystery!

No, we didn’t. We have been liaising with some Tasmanians for many years. We have travelled down almost every year for the past eight years or so.

This is a wildlife mystery that transcends state lines and international borders.

We can’t control media interpretations or individual perceptions.

Criticism: We have ignored the previous excellent work by other researchers.

No, we haven’t.

We have been at pains to continually mention the work of countless other researchers including some of the luminaries in the field – David Fleay, Stephen Sleightholme, Eric Guiler, Heinz Moeller, Col Bailey, Bob Paddle, and Nick Mooney, to name a few.

Indeed, we are referring to their knowledge to inform what we are doing for our own project.

The media edit, omit and relay information as they see fit – we have no control over the final news product.

Criticism: The time period in the field is too short.

We would have loved to stay longer but we are all governed by financial obligations and mundane work-a-day concerns. This was the first of many trips over a two-year period.

Anyone want to sponsor us for some fulltime research? ☺

Criticism: We had too many people, or we didn’t have enough people.

The number of people on the trip is really irrelevant – members were split into teams to canvass areas, set up camera traps and interview witnesses.

There was not, as some people might imagine, a conga line of cryptozoologists shuffling through the Australian bush.

Criticism: We didn’t have the right background/expertise/knowledge to be undertaking the expedition.

Bear in mind that many of the great zoological rediscoveries of ‘Lazarus’ species (those species labelled extinct that have been ‘rediscovered’) have been made by everyday people, including naturalists (surviving night parrot population), fishermen (coelacanth, subsequently handed to a museum curator), teenagers (the Bermuda petrel was found by a 15yo boy, and subsequently a naturalist and ornithologist), and bushwalkers (the NZ Takahe was discovered by a bushwalker who also happened to be a doctor of medicine).

Many if not all scientists are at some stage informed in their discoveries by the knowledge of local people who are aware of the species but have felt no need to either classify them or study them in-depth. Seldom are these discoveries the work of just one person.

The team collectively is well read on the subject of Thylacines, have studied the scats and tracks of Australian (and in particular Tasmanian) wildlife, and plotted maps of contemporary sightings to inform the direction of the project.

The team is also liaising with scientists and other naturalists over any interesting discoveries we come across.

Like any good expedition, it’s all about teamwork both within and beyond the immediate team of people who travelled to Tasmania.

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If you think you can do better by all means get involved – the more the merrier, and we just might collectively achieve something great!

If you think it’s all a waste of time, well, that’s fine too. But don’t waste your time or ours by moaning about it and expecting a reply.

In the meantime, we’ll just get on with it. As I’m sure every one of you has had personal experience of by now, the Internet can be a fantastic time sink.

Better we all spend our time doing something rather than just talking about doing, or rubbishing those out there who are doing. We're not the only ones out there looking, after all :-)

And to our loyal readers, supporters, and peers – thanks for rallying behind our multi-faceted project. Let's hope some good comes of it.

Archer: Col Bailey's thylacine sighting credible

Noted zoologist Professor Mike Archer, a former director of the Australian Museum, has said despite his professional scepticism, he respects Tiger Hunter Col Bailey's theory that a population of thylacines still exists in Tasmania.

In a recent interview with ABC Radio, Archer and Bailey talked about Thylacines and Col's new book, Shadow of the Thylacine, and his sighting of a Thylacine in the Weld Valley in Tasmania.

"Of course I want to believe in Col's story...every fibre in me resonates along with the same view that Col has...this is Australia's king of beasts, this is the most magnificent creature Australia has ever produced," Archer said.

"I feel...a sense of intense excitement that maybe somehow it has survived over the years. My scepticism, of course, and I have discussed this with Col, it is the scepticism of a scientist. It's very hard to test sightings, these are personal things...but when I know the man, like I know Col, that's not just a normal sighting, if you like, that's coming from a really credible person whose judgement I would never question. All I can say is I wish I'd been there with him."

Professor Archer is hopeful of one day reviving a project to bring the thylacine back to life by using DNA from museum specimens to clone them.

Listen to the interview here.