Out on a Limb

Lisa Clausen | The Australian | May 14, 2010

THE smoke from cooking fires drifts above the Torricelli Mountains, a low and ancient range huddled on Papua New Guinea's north coast.

Through the rainforest roam transparent-winged moths, huge woolly rats and shimmering birds of paradise – alongside, many villagers still believe, fearful spirits guarding their forbidden places, or ples masalai. In just this one mountain range live eight mammals found nowhere else.

The biggest is the Scott’s Tree-Kangaroo, known by locals as the Tenkile – a species known to science only since 1989, when it was first described by Tim Flannery. Among hunters, the Tenkile’s size – enough to feed a family – once made it a trophy catch, and for many years its pungent odour mingled with the smoke of those fires snaking up and over the dark trees.

One of 17 kinds of tree-kangaroo found in PNG, the total habitat area of the Tenkile (pronounced “ten-kee-lee”) is just 125 square kilometres. It’s one of the most endangered mammals in the world, with only about 300 remaining. And they must share the forest with around 10,000 people who survive on what they can grow or hunt – these days armed with guns as well as their traditional bows.

The human population in the Torricelli Mountains has nearly trebled in the past 50 years, and traditional beliefs revering the Tenkile and other animals as ancestors have faded. In 1990, an exorcism was performed by a Catholic priest on one of the area’s most important ples masalai, expelling the ferocious eel spirits that had unleashed bad weather or sickness on trespassers for generations; it resulted in hunters flooding into prime Tenkile habitat. By 2003, the species was in trouble; villagers who were used to catching a dozen of them a day were lucky to come home with one. But it was also the year the Tenkile’s luck changed with the arrival of Victorian zookeepers Jim and Jean Thomas.

Jim Thomas first heard of the Tenkile in grim stories told around a campfire by tree-kangaroo expert Roger Martin. The species, Thomas learnt, was already critically endangered – down to as few as 100 individuals in 2001 – and likely to be gone within a decade. “I don’t know why,” he says, “but it just lit a fire underneath me. I thought, ‘I just have to go and save this animal.’” Working with endangered species at Melbourne Zoo and Victoria’s Healesville Sanctuary, he’d bridled at the red tape he saw choking grassroots conservation efforts. So when the offer came in 2003 to run Zoos Victoria’s fledgling Tenkile Conservation Alliance in the PNG rainforest, it was an unmissable chance, says Jim, “to make a real difference”.

The Tenkile, which weighs around 10kg and is similar in size to a rock wallaby, spends much of its time in the jungle canopy, where its powerful arms come into play. It descends to the ground at dusk to frequent favourite trees, where it forages on vines, ferns and leaves, before returning to the canopy to sleep. It faces only one predator – but an especially persistent one. When the Thomases arrived in PNG, a hunting ban negotiated with some of the villages several years earlier by an expedition of Australian zoologists was barely holding together.

“The first six months were the hardest – we didn’t know how long we’d be able to stick it out,” says Jim, 40.
The few Tenkile that remained to be hunted were still being boiled or smoked on fires, and villagers were wary of outsiders they suspected would soon disappear back to comfortable lives elsewhere. So while Jean – who is also a high-school teacher – began introducing conservation programs into local schools and on regional radio, Jim trekked the mountains to each of the 18 villages in the Tenkile’s habitat. Asking subsistence farmers whose children suffer malnutrition to forgo a traditional food source was bold, but the couple’s message was equally blunt: “We said, ‘Of course it’s your choice to still hunt Tenkile. But you have to understand that if you do, in five years there will be none left,’” says Jim.

Hearts, minds and stomachs
In a country of 800 languages, less a nation than a collection of tribes, clan is the heartbeat of daily life in PNG. Countless sheer-sided valleys enclose tiny marooned worlds, many of them accessible only on foot through perilous terrain. In the Torricellis, the wet season brings around 3.5 metres of rain, wiping out roads, leaving a tiny airstrip the only link to the outside world. Jim Thomas was one of the first white people many villagers had seen.

They were struck, he says, by a foreigner journeying on foot, and his willingness to sit and talk in the creole language Tok Pisin, smoking the local tobacco, brus, or chewing betelnut. “They couldn’t believe a white man would eat their food or sleep in their house,” he says. They were surprised, too, when he told them the Tenkile was unique to their mountains. “They thought there were plenty of them everywhere.”

Jim Thomas talked and talked, and smoked and talked, and by 2004 all 18 villages in the Tenkile’s habitat had committed to stop hunting the animal. In 2006, following his visits, 21 other villages in the mountains also agreed to stop hunting their local species, the endangered Weimang, or Golden-mantled Tree-Kangaroo.

With tree-kangaroos off-limits, the Thomases moved to put something else on the menu. As well as giving out chickens they distributed rabbits – the tropical heat makes it unlikely that escapees could gain a foothold as pests – and began teaching people how to keep and breed them. One village alone now has more than 300 rabbits which it sells for meat. At the same time, Jim began surveying Tenkile numbers by tracking their scats (faeces). In 2004, he and local staff recorded 147 Tenkile; by the end of 2008, they had tracked 308. “People are seeing Tenkile on their land again, in places where they hadn’t seen them for 20 years or more,” he says. “It’s made them really proud – they say now, ‘Tenkile is our gold medal and we want to keep it shining.’”

Jean Thomas says the project’s success comes from dogged common sense. “We came up with a simple solution – an alternative to hunting. We’ve never gone around with big ideas that we couldn’t fulfil.” What’s good for local people is also good for the Tenkile and Weimang, and so far the Thomases have helped install 78 rainwater tanks, while another 243, donated by the European Union and AusAid, are on their way. “If people don’t have to spend time collecting clean water, they have more time for looking after chickens and rabbits,” says Jim.

Making their base in the village of Lumi, the couple spent the first two years in a thatched hut, sharing it with giant spiders and rats and showering under buckets of cold water. They’ve both endured several bouts of malaria. With their three-year-old son, Tadji, they’re now more at home in what looks like an oversized garden shed, next door to the new classroom built for training, education and village meetings, and a small sanctuary. Complete with solar power and, as of last year, an internet connection, their home also has two snakes free-ranging inside (“I think they’re in the roof,” laughs Jim) to keep the rodents at bay.

Throughout it all, the couple’s great aim has been to have a 100,000ha conservation area declared over Tenkile and Weimang habitat. They’re relying on local cooperation, asking ¬village representatives to come up with their own boundaries rather than simply drawing lines on a map themselves. “I don’t know of anyone anywhere who is doing better conservation in a developing country,” says Tim Flannery, who “discovered” the Tenkile on an expedition into the ranges. “None of the big organisations are as effective, dollar for dollar, as Jim and Jean have been, and they have just learnt on the job. Very few people are willing to dedicate their lives to something like this.”

But the dedication of the past seven years, which they’ve spent as volunteers, has been tested. Late last year on the 10-hour drive to the nearest town of Wewak, Jim and his staff were stopped by a man demanding money. The group was threatened with an axe and Jim had to hand over 500 kina – around $200 – “to save our lives”. Badly shaken, on their annual Christmas visit back to their bush block outside Melbourne Jim needed counselling; he still suffers nightmares. When they flew back to PNG they packed two baseball bats. Guard dogs now patrol their yard. “But even after that happened I still think, ‘Thank God we’re in PNG,’” he says. “We’ve still got a lot to do.”

The Thomases plan to stay in the Torricellis for another three years before coming back to Australia for Tadji’s schooling. But even then they’ll keep returning to make sure that the mysterious tree-dwellers they’ve worked so hard to protect remain safe. In the meantime Jim is waiting for the rains to stop so he can begin trekking to far-flung Weimang villages, battling mud and fording fierce rivers, and sleeping rough under a mosquito net among the dark trees. “There are a lot of very smart and dedicated conservationists who are more educated than we are,” he says, “but not many can hack it out here.”

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Out on a Limb