In an Australia-first, the Border’s own ‘Dr Dave’ is leading the hunt for a mysterious species only thought to be in the wilderness of New Guinea.
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CSU Thurgoona ecology professor David Watson has kept up with rumours the long-beaked echidna has not actually gone extinct in Australia – but now, he is well and truly on the scent.
“There’s fossils and cave paintings of big-arse echidnas at Arnhem Land – we know they were here, almost certainly Indigenous folks interacted with them, and there’s a small chance they’re still there,” he said.
“The Kimberley region is a pretty poorly-known corner of the world, so if you were going to hide a 15-kilogram nocturnal spikey thing in Australia, that’s where you’d hide it.”
The “common garden variety” of echidna is commonplace, but the long-beaked species is something special – up to 40 centimetres in height and 16 kilograms in weight, they prefer the dark and humid environment of dense rainforest.
In 2001, James Kohen of Macquarie University wrote of a conversation with an Aboriginal woman, who after seeing signs of an echidna, said her grandmothers “used to hunt the other one”, a much larger species that had not been seen for some years.
The rumour-mill only started churning again in 2012 when it was reported an echidna skull and skin in London’s National Museum of Natural History was collected from the Western Kimberley region in 1901.
Dr Watson said there was only one long-beaked echidna alive in captivity, and this lonesome mammal would be integral to any sighting of its kind in the wild, a first in Australian history.
“There’s one at Taronga Zoo, and just last week I made final arrangements to get its turd shipped from Taronga to my dog trainer, who is training a dog to find long-beaked echidna droppings,” he said.
“That dog will tell us which sites (in the Kimberley) are most likely, and we’ll set some cameras up.”
This dog trainer, from the NSW South Coast, will be part of the five-person team including researchers and conservationists to be transported by helicopter to the remote locations.
Dr Watson will first visit the region in Spring to meet with Indigenous communities and get the lie of the land, before returning in Spring 2018 for two months.
“I’d say it’s a 10 to 20 per cent chance it’s still there – if it is, we’ll find it, but I’m not convinced it’s still there,” he said.
“When I talk to people about it, they say I’m chasing ghosts, but think of the Wollemi pine – a giant tree found next to the biggest city in Australia – that was unlikely, but it happened.”
