The trouble with hairy

It's far rarer than the giant panda, but the northern hairy-nosed wombat never seems to make the news. James Woodford tracks the shy mammal that's quietly dying out in our own backyard.

In aerial photographs, Epping Forest National Park in central Queensland is shaped like a vandalised hexagon. In a State that has the highest rate of land-clearing in Australia - up to 450,000 hectares of scrub and forest are removed each year - agriculture pounds against the boundary of the 3,300-hectare park. And as I entered its gates I immediately understood why northern hairy-nosed wombats - their estimated population is around 100 - are in such trouble. The world has run out of space for them and few people seem to care.

By comparison, 1,000 wild giant pandas live in China's bamboo forests and they are a mammalian cause célèbre. Zoos clamber over each other to have one on display and the birth of a panda anywhere in captivity attracts breathless media attention. Not one single northern hairy-nosed wombat is in the relative safety of captivity, no-one knows how to get them to breed, they refuse to eat choice pickings of food left for them in times of drought and 90 per cent of their lives are a profound secret conducted in giant, complex burrows. Thanks to habitat pressures, they now occupy a mere 300 hectares.

In spite of the wombats being listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as critically endangered, the people who manage the park must still tread carefully when it comes to protecting them. Government officials do not allow feral animal baiting within 500 metres of the southern boundary of the park because they are afraid of killing pastoralists' dogs. And although cattle from nearby farms have been banned from the park since 1981, there are still incursions. The nearest park ranger is three hours' drive from Epping.

In the year before my visit, an estimated 10 per cent of the world's entire population of northern hairy-nosed wombats were eaten by dingoes.

Just over 100 years ago, northern hairy-nosed wombats could be found in NSW, Queensland and Victoria. In 1872, Sir Richard Owen was the first European to describe a northern hairy-nosed wombat - from a fossil skull found in the Wellington Caves in central-western NSW. He called the animal Lasiorhinus krefftii to honour mammalian palaeontologist Johann Krefft. In 1900 some unfossilised wombat skulls were sent to the Queensland Museum by a Mr Gillespie of St George in south-western Queensland. The new skulls were given the scientific name Phascolomys gillespiei. (Aborigines told Gillespie the wombat was called "yaminon".)

In 1937, brothers Charles and Greensill Barnard were sent to the centre of the State by the Queensland Museum to confirm reports of a "new kind of wombat". They shot one and sent its skin to the museum, where it was named as a subspecies of the southern hairy-nosed wombat. And on October 2, in a letter now held at the Queensland Museum, Charles Barnard wrote: "My brother and I returned yesterday from another wombat hunt. After a round trip of nearly 800 miles I regret to say that we were unsuccessful in obtaining any more specimens of wombat. We spent a whole week at the place where we secured the first one &, although we kept going night and day, & having traps out, we did not see even one

& had come to the conclusion that there were very few animals in the area. There might be 100 burrows in a distance of two miles by half-mile, but from the tracks there might be only 20 animals."

It was not until 1983 that Dr Lyn Dawson, a palaeontologist at the Australian Museum, set to work trying to untangle the past 150 years of wombat fossil taxonomy on finds from the Wellington Caves. She discovered that the Pleistocene fossil skulls described by Owen, the skulls found by Gillespie, the skin the Barnard brothers sent and the living beast were all the same thing. The northern hairy-nosed wombat is a genuine living fossil, a creature discovered only after it was thought to be extinct.

I have seen fossil northern hairy-nosed wombats at Lake Mungo in NSW, where fragments of their skeletons can be found emerging from the eroding dunes. Even more amazingly, their burrows are visible as fossils - metre-wide discolourations snaking across the sand. Alongside the remains of the wombats are preserved skeletons of Tasmanian tigers, perhaps the ancient predators of these animals.

Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service researcher Dr Alan Horsup travels to Epping Forest several times a year to make sure nothing catastrophic happens to the population; he oversees all research on the animals and chairs the committee of officials and scientists responsible for them.

I arranged to join Horsup - a tall and lean New Zealander whose doctoral studies were on rock wallabies - at the park to help survey the burrows last October. After a 31/2-hour drive north-west of Emerald, including nearly 125 kilometres on dirt road, mostly in the dark, I finally reached his campsite. He was in the forest with a Green Corps team, a group of young adults who were being trained in environmental work.

"The northern hairy-nosed wombat," Horsup said, handing me some stir-fry and a beer, "will be extinct within 100 years if nothing is done."

By 10 pm it had cooled down. Horsup decided the hairy-nosed wombats might now be venturing from their burrows. We left camp in his four-wheel drive, me perched on the bonnet holding a spotlight powered by the car battery.

The wildlife was out in force - almost every sweep of the beam caught the red eyes of kangaroos, bettongs and rabbits, even a tawny frogmouth. For about 20 minutes we drove no faster than 10 km/h along the "hairy-nosed highway" - a rutted, sandy, potholed track just wide enough for one vehicle. We did not see even a trace of a wombat.

"You have just driven through the entire range of the northern hairy-nosed wombat," I heard Horsup declare in a voice muffled by the windscreen. "There's no point retracing our route - they scare easily and I have never seen one when I have backtracked."

We drove down some offshoot tracks and into an area where there were only scattered burrows. Nothing.

The next morning, some time between four and five, as the loudest bird chorus I'd ever heard broke out, Horsup was up preparing breakfast. By 6.30, we were working at a wombat colony a few kilometres away.

Horsup and I went to survey all 208 of the numbered burrows. We drove to Burrow 28 where, the previous month, he had found three wombat carcasses showing evidence of a dingo attack. Altogether on that trip he had found five dead wombats. The day I arrived he had found another two - one mauled body and, a few hundred metres away, a decomposing wombat intestine. Assuming that not all of the dead wombats had been located, he estimated that up to 10 may have been killed in the previous 12 months.

"If 10 per cent of the world's giant pandas had died in a year there would be an absolute uproar," Horsup grumbled. "I look at burrows differently since we have had this predation problem. Some are a bit like a morgue."

There was no sign of life at Burrow 28. On the chart stuck to his clipboard Horsup made a note: "No recent activity."

One of the few ways in which Horsup and his team have been able to obtain information about the wombats is to trap them - a difficult process. Unlike most other Australian animals, which are attracted by baits placed in traps, northerns treat any efforts to entice them into a cage with suspicion. The only way the Queenslanders can catch them is to fence off every active burrow system and place traps at exit points in the fences. Then it is a game of patience as the scientists wait for the animals to succumb to hunger. On average it takes seven nights of being locked inside its burrow for a northern hairy-nosed wombat to choose to walk into a trap. Horsup once waited 12 nights, just hours shy of the amount of time the animal-ethics committee he reports to allowed for the cages to remain in place.

When trapping is under way, a vet is constantly on site, and the shutting of a trap triggers a radio signal that is relayed back to a permanently stationed member of the team. This procedure is meant to ensure that a wombat spends no more than one hour inside its cage before it is collected, weighed, tagged, has a blood sample taken and released. Each captured animal is scored on a scale of zero to five, with zero being dead and five obese. The highest score ever given has been four.

One animal, known as Male 25, proved to be trap-happy - he was caught 58 times, and became the central character in the book The Wombat Who Talked to the Stars by Jill Morris.

"When I was studying rock wallabies," Horsup told me, "I watched those things every dawn and dusk and I really had a feel for their characters. I had names for them, they had quirks in their appearance and personality.

But with these wombats, it's hard to build up empathy. They are extremely nocturnal, they burrow, their habitat is thickly wooded and heavily grassed and they are very secretive. It is almost as though they don't want any help."

Horsup has tried to catch the entire colony twice and the results have been depressing. Each time, 41 animals were caught. In 1993, the breakdown of males to females was 25 to 16.

In 1999, the sex ratio had worsened - 28 males to 13 females. Of the 100-odd northerns alive today, only about 30 per cent are thought to be female. Such a skewed ratio had not been found by other scientists working at Epping Forest in the 1980s - even when the total population sank to its estimated nadir of 25 in 1981.

The low number of females may accelerate the deterioration of the northerns' gene pool. With as few as 20 possible mothers, inbreeding and loss of variation are almost inevitable. Already it appears the wombats are beginning a deeply disturbing genetic decline. They have only 41 per cent of the genetic variation that would be found in a population of their closest relatives, southern hairy-nosed wombats.

Dr Andrea Taylor, a geneticist at the school of biological sciences at Monash University, has worked on the northerns' DNA and gained new insight into their genetic journey during the past century. Taylor suggests that in the early 1980s the sexually active population may have fallen as low as seven to 10 individuals.

Horsup's trapping program has confirmed that the northerns are a long-lived species - six of those caught in 1999 were older than 17 years. Only once has a northern hairy-nosed wombat been kept in captivity. "Joan" was captured in 1966 when cattle farmers neighbouring the park bulldozed a burrow to get themselves a pet wombat. At that time such an action was neither illegal nor unusual. When she was caught she was already an adult, at least two years old. She lived in a cage with a concrete floor until 1991 when the parks and wildlife service required her keepers to give her some sand so she could dig. She died in 1993.

Joan's life in captivity led Horsup and his colleagues to believe that keeping a northern would be relatively easy. On June 22, 1996, Solstice - a juvenile male the scientists knew as Male 104 - was trapped and sent down to Western Plains Zoo in central western NSW to begin a captive breeding program. For six weeks Solstice refused to eat and had to be force-fed. Staff would sedate him and use a syringe to force gruel down his throat. He lost one-third of his body weight and in January 1997 died suddenly from a twisted bowel. "He just used to stand there," veterinarian David Blyde told me. "It was like he was just absolutely bewildered by the whole thing. He didn't seem to respond to anything. There was no reaction to our presence; no avoidance behaviour."

Later that year, zookeepers caught a second wombat. According to Western Plains Zoo staff (who were alone at the time in the Epping Forest) it had entered its trap during the day and its capture was not registered by the radio equipment. By the time it was found, the wombat had died from heat exhaustion.

In more than 400 previous captures there had never been such a disaster. The Queensland Government, fearful of the consequences of the loss of any more of Australia's rarest mammal, immediately halted plans to establish northern hairy-nosed wombats at Western Plains Zoo, citing the risks as unacceptable.

The environment Horsup and I were walking through was so parched it reminded me of a vast dried floral arrangement. The dirt was fine and dry, and when disturbed by our vehicles it floated in the air like a red fog. It was clear, however, that the build-up to the wet was coming - huge grey clouds grew thicker and thicker in the skies as the afternoon wore on. The wet season replenishes the landscape, and the entire ecosystem is reliant on its regular arrival. In the early 1990s this region had six solid years of drought as one El Nio followed another in unnatural succession, which did nothing to help the northerns. The downside of the wet, however, is that once it arrives, the wombats are on their own, since the roads into the park become impassable.

"This is not how it should look," Horsup said, waving his arm at all the dried East African grass that was taking over the park. "I see the buffel grass as a triffid - an invader." The buffel grass - a noxious African weed that is the preferred pasture of the local graziers - smothers the vegetation the wombats favour and, even though the northerns eat it, it is not their favoured food. They eat at least 12 species of grass or sedge but the biggest proportion of their diet is made up of four native species: three-awn grasses, bottle-washer grasses and a local sedge called Fimbristylis dichotoma. Out of necessity, however, the weed has become a staple of the marsupials - in 1993 it made up two per cent of their diet, and by 1996 more than a quarter of it. Horsup also fears that the buffel is so thick that it may act like a confusing maze to the wombats when being hunted by ferals.

By mid-morning we had made our way to Burrow 30. After a long stretch of silence during which Horsup made notes on his clipboard, he became unusually animated. The reason? A northern hairy-nosed wombat turd. It was cube-shaped and the size of the top joint of a man's thumb. It looked as though it had been left there as recently as the previous evening. Fresh poo means living wombats, and after the experiences of the past few months

a new black cube (the shape baffles scientists) was a welcome sight. This one was bone-dry and as light as pumice stone. "It's so light because these guys are not drinking," Horsup said. "They're getting all the water out of what they eat. Their metabolic rates are almost reptilian. They may be slow and unspectacular but they have got it worked out." Wombats have among the lowest water needs of any mammal on Earth - around one-fifth of a sheep's and a quarter of a kangaroo's.

My first book was about the discovery of a new genus of tree called the Wollemi pine - a plant with a fossil history stretching back to the dinosaurs. Wollemia nobilis grew all over the Australian continent, but at the time of its discovery in 1994, in a canyon in a wilderness neighbouring Sydney, only 40 remained. This prehistoric plant tells a bizarre genetic story - each of the trees has identical DNA. Like the wombats, Wollemi pines were first known from fossils and are found alive in a single national park. Unless Wollemi pines are successfully cultivated, a single disaster could wipe them out. During my stay at Epping Forest I realised that these trees and northern hairy-nosed wombats share many of the same problems.

"Like the Wollemis, the whole hairy-nosed story is here in this one spot," Horsup said. "Normally, wild animal populations go up and down because of droughts, fires, good times and bad times. But if you have one of these events in a population of 100 animals you could lose half your breeding females and there may be no recovery from there. It's a bit like a plane that keeps stalling - you lose altitude all the time and you can't get out of the dive. And we know the next drought is just around the corner."

The biggest difference between the two organisms is that Wollemia nobilis is a botanical superstar, with huge public interest and large amounts of government and private research dollars being spent on its survival. When seven northern hairy-nosed wombats are attacked and killed by dingoes, however, they're lucky to get a few column inches in the newspapers.

On the weekend before I travelled to Epping Forest, a conservation team met at Western Plains Zoo and decided the only hope for the wombats was to consider locking them away from the outside world with a predator-proof fence (it would cost about $300,000, but no-one had yet come up with the money). The downside would be that the population would cease to be wild.

The deaths of the two wombats during the trapping program and of those recently killed by predators effectively mean that any plans of spreading the risk of extinction by establishing another colony elsewhere is more in doubt. It is a catch-22 situation - the hairy-nosed wombats cannot be secure in the long term if they live in one small section of a tiny national park. But the risks of moving the 12 to 18 animals needed to establish another population, either in captivity or in one of the areas where they were once found, are just too great.

When they are gone it will be a statistic on the conscience of every Australian. As great a loss as the Tasmanian tiger. This loss, however, will not be something we can blame on our forebears. The extinction will occur in our lifetimes or our children's.

The night I invaded the personal space of a reclusive northern hairy-nosed wombat

To see a northern hairy-nosed wombat at Epping Forest is a rare privilege and one that only a few dozen people have had. James Woodford describes the night he got lucky.

Our plan was to head out spotlighting after dinner. We rigged up an infrared filter for a spotlight and tested the video camera's night-vision facility. Around 10 pm, Green Corps co-ordinator Jeff Arneth, Alan Horsup and I set off. I sat on the bonnet of Alan's four-wheel drive, feet wedged up against the vehicle's bullbar, my butt protected by a shabby bit of foam. The evening was windy and threatening, and the air was filled with dust. "The one thing we know for sure," Horsup told me, "is that wombats don't like wind. It confuses them.

Maybe they become nervous, because wind makes it harder to hear predators, but we don't usually see native animals on windy nights." My spotlight lit up the swirling specks of dust as if they were stars.

"Concentrate on the left up here," Horsup said as we reached the outer limit of the glow of our camp. Even in the dark he knows the location of each burrow. The light swept through the scrub, up and down, left to right, right to left, down and up. As I completed my second or third series of sweeps, my spotlight flicked back. "What's that?" I thought. I swung the light around.

I could see a log lying in the knee-high grass. Then I saw the curves of a fat, fur-covered bottom and caught a glimpse of a tiny movement. I knocked on the windscreen behind me and Horsup stopped. A cloud of dust enveloped me as he reversed the vehicle. When the dirt settled the wombat was still there. I remembered Horsup's advice not to shine the light right on the animal. The beam from the spotlight was tattooing a figure-8 pattern on the landscape just below the wombat. The animal turned around with a startled, embarrassed look on its face, reminding me of a chubby child caught by bullies when a toilet door is flung open. My joy was suddenly tempered by a feeling of guilt that I had disturbed the grazing creature. The animal in my beam was clearly unsure what to do and I remembered Horsup's words earlier in the day when I had asked him whether wombats are smart.

"They're as intelligent as they need to be," Horsup replied. "They live down a hole, they come out occasionally to feed - I think they have got all the faculties they need."

At first the wombat stood side-on to my beam, motionless. I could see its little legs, the health of its fur. I could see its elongated whisker-covered muzzle and near-blind eyes trying to see through the spotlight. It started to move off away from the beam. Perhaps 20 seconds had passed since my brain had converted a log into a marsupial.

I could make out the trail it was following as my beam followed its feet. Its legs reminded me of those of a low coffee table. It was clear, even as it sought to escape the beam, that it was utterly baffled by our sudden arrival. By now it had begun to trot away and I let out an accidental exclamation that, as Horsup put it, got its fast-twitch muscles going. In what seemed a fraction of an instant the wombat was gone.

An edited extract from The Secret Life of Wombats, by James Woodford, to be published by Text Publishing on July 2.