Choose any road in Tasmania at any time of night or day and a once rare sight may lie in wait: a wedge-tailed eagle devouring road kill.
But unfortunately, according to wild life authorities, it is a sign of a collapse in the natural order of the animal kingdom in Australia's island state.
"The eagles are landing on the roads because the Tasmanian devils are dying out," says David Pemberton, zoology curator at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart.
"The devils were the road kill and carrion cleaners of the state. Nothing was as fast or thorough as a devil dragging off a dead bird or snake. Until the mystery cancer that is driving them to what we fear might be the brink of extinction came along."
The problem is that the wedge-tail eagles, some as large as young turkeys, are not quick as a devil when a car suddenly rounds a bend.
On the often winding and picturesque roads of Tasmania, the eagles are themselves becoming road kill, because it takes them a few fatal seconds to unfold their powerful wings and get airborne.
Pemberton is part of a large study into the facial cancer of unknown cause that ten years ago began to spread through the ranks of the feisty, raucous, fearsomely toothed dog sized `devils' which are the world's largest surviving carnivorous marsupials.
The disfiguring cancer has no cure as well as no known cause, although chemical contamination of habitats is under suspicion and it kills by eventually preventing the animals from eating.
The disease first appeared in the north of the state, coincidentally shortly after a major campaign by some land users to poison native animals.
"Numbers of devils are down by 40 to 90 percent," Pemberton says. "The surge in reports of eagle kills on the roads coincides with an upwards trend in ferret and fox numbers — the guild of carnivores is changing."
A group of shooters have been blamed for illegally importing foxes from mainland Australia shortly after the devil disease first appeared in 1996 in a misguided attempt to create more opportunities to `spotlight' — or go hunting at night, with a bright lamp, for wild animals.
But like ferrets, which are also classified as vermin in Australia, the foxes were prey to the devils, which raid the dens of natural and introduced animals alike and kill the young.
Because of the devils, ferrets never achieved the same foothold in Tasmania as they have in parts of the mainland.
"We thought the devils may have saved us from the foxes but not any more," Pemberton says. His museum houses collections and exhibits concerning other threatened or extinct species, including the famous thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger, of which the last known living specimen died in captivity in 1936.
"Devils lived widely across all of Australia for tens of thousands of years, but died out on the mainland after a long period of retreat some 400 years ago, well before European settlement," Pemberton says.
"Their tenure in Tasmania was being compromised by land clearing, and now, unless the disease passes, or we find a cause and a cure, we will not only see a classic modern case of an island species extinction, but a cascading effect that could threaten birds like the eagles and even domestic or farm animals by exposing them to germs that will find new territory in the carcasses of animals that used to be cleaned up by the devils."
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