Andrew Orchard lives near the northeastern coast of Tasmania, in the same ramshackle farmhouse that his great-grandparents, the first generation of his English family to be born on the Australian island, built in The Tasmanian tiger, known to science as the thylacine, was the only member of its genus of marsupial carnivores to live to modern times. When Orchard was growing up, his father would tell him stories of having snared one, on his property, many years after the last confirmed animal died, in the nineteen-thirties.
Long before the invention of digital trail cameras, Orchard was out in the bush rigging film cameras to motion sensors, hoping to get a picture of a tiger. The larger costs of his fascination are harder to calculate. The first English settlers arrived in and soon began spreading across the island, whose human and animal inhabitants had lived in isolation for more than ten thousand years.
Conflict was almost immediate. By then, the number of dead tigers, like the number of live ones, was steeply declining. In , the state treasury paid out for forty-two carcasses. In , it paid for seventeen. The following year, there were two, and then none the year after, or the year after that, or ever again.
By , when Tasmania put a pair of tigers on its coat of arms, the real thing was rarely seen. By , when a farmer named Wilf Batty shot what was later recognized as the last Tasmanian tiger killed in the wild, it was such a curiosity that people came from all over to look at the body.
The Hobart city council noted the death at a meeting the following week, and authorized thirty pounds to fund the purchase of a replacement. Like the dodo and the great auk, the tiger found a curious immortality as a global icon of extinction , more renowned for the tragedy of its death than for its life, about which little is known.
