Nexus - 1805 - New Times Magazine-pages

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7, — Woodside, a small town in Victoria's Gippsland, part of an effort by the state's Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) to deal with an unknown predator that had slaughtered more than 400 sheep in wo years, each victim expertly despatched (and devoured) with the efficiency of a butcher. DSE officials were stumped, and ey were pulling out all stops to try o solve the mystery that had so far cost a Victorian farmer thousands of dollars in lost stock—and threatened e credibility of the department. Trapping, snaring and fur traps had all failed to reveal the true nature of e beast, so thermal imaging equipment was employed in an eleventh-hour bid to halt the stock osses. There was talk of wild dogs a e time, but none of the corpses bore the hallmarks of dog attacks. [here was no mess and little blood, and most of the corpses were devoid of flesh with only head, hide and ooves left behind. It was, for the most part, a clean, clinical kill every disturbing—was the discovery early one morning of several sheep standing ina field, their faces mauled beyond recognition. They were still alive—just—but where a snout should have protruded from each woolly face there was now just a mass of red, shredded flesh and broken cartilage and bone. The woman at the centre of the drama, sheep farmer Elizabeth Balderstone, was mystified as to what had attacked and killed hundreds of her sheep. "Over the two-and-a-half years, we've lost over 400 sheep,” Ms Balderstone told ABC Radio (20 July 1999). "We have them badly mauled around the tail and still alive but will die within a couple of days, or mauled around the face when whole jawbones have been removed. Other times the sheep are killed and partially or totally eaten out, when there's just the fleece and bone skeleton left, and very little else.” Overshadowing the gruesome discoveries were sightings of two enormous cats on the property—one brown, the other black—by a local by Rebecca Lang and Michael Williams © 2010-11 Hecees hover noisily overhead, the occupants scanning the sheep-filled paddocks, undulating grassy terrain fringed with dark, forbidding bush. On the ground, rangers comb the property, deep in the Victorian countryside. Their hand-held radios briefly crackle into life, sounding hard and scratchy amid the dull "thwock, thwock, thwock" of the helicopter blades above. State-of- the-art thermal imaging equipment throws up heat signatures of wildlife and livestock, transforming flesh and blood into blobby splashes of red with yellow-green haloes as the rangers scan the land for something large and out of place. Something alien and deadly. Something on a killing spree. Hollywood couldn't have done it better. But this isn't an action sequence from some creature feature; these events actually took place in 1997 on a farm near time. NEXUS ¢ 65 AUSTRALIA’S BIG-CAT MYSTERY Just as unusual—and even more AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2011 www.nexusmagazine.com