Hunt for the thylacine: Tasmania’s camera trap pioneers
Did you know Tasmania led the way in camera trap use in the Southern Hemisphere?
Back in 1950, The Mercury reported on a quest by one of Australia’s earliest known camera trappers: a Victorian naturalist who journeyed to Tasmania in search of the thylacine. His name was withheld at his request, fearing that his attempt to photograph the Tassie tiger “might make him appear silly.” Using a homemade “trip-lighting apparatus,” he set up his camera at Adamsfield in the remote south-west and at Cockle Creek on the south coast. He didn’t find the tiger but did set a precedent for the decades that followed.
By the 1960s, Dr Eric Guiler from the University of Tasmania was already experimenting with G45 aircraft cameras – rugged 8 mm movie cameras originally used in WWII fighter planes, retrofitted for wildlife research and triggered by treadle plates. Later, throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the search for the thylacine intensified with the use of custom-built camera traps that Guiler affectionately referred to as his “gorgeous little toys”. On one expedition, they were placed along 10 km of track in Tasmania’s northwest, and over six months, Guiler exposed more than 20 rolls of film, capturing images of devils, wombats and wallabies – but never the elusive tiger.
Meanwhile, Steven Smith led the National Parks and Wildlife team, following up thylacine sightings from across the state in a custom-built four-wheel-drive Subaru camper that doubled as both darkroom and accommodation.
With funding from the World Wildlife Fund, the team built three new photographic units in 1980: weatherproof boxes containing Pentax MX 35 mm cameras with motor drives, bulk film magazines (good for 250+ shots), and Metz flash units. A Sick Optik Elektronik infrared source and reflector were mounted on wooden stakes positioned four metres apart to trigger the camera’s shutter when the beam was broken. Baits were hung a metre off the ground to tempt animals into the beam. The whole system was powered by three car batteries, topped up by a Honda 500 generator at base camp.
At around $2,500–$3,600 per unit (about $11,000–$16,000 in today’s money), these setups were a major investment! Not to mention the cost of travel, labour, film, and developing chemicals. Over the course of the survey, 420 photos were taken at 17 sites across 111 camera-days. Hard-won images at the time – today, the same number of photos might be captured in a single night with a digital camera trap.
One of the biggest challenges, Smith noted, was finding places remote enough to avoid unwanted human interference, but accessible enough for routine maintenance. The longest they could leave a camera unattended was eight days – again, a far cry from the weeks or months today’s digital units can run using lithium batteries and SD cards. Solar panels were considered but deemed too expensive at the time.
While the thylacine never showed up in the frame, these efforts marked an important chapter in the history of camera trapping, long before it became a standard tool in conservation monitoring.
Today, camera traps are everywhere – from backyard bushland to the top of Mount Roland. And yes, a few people are still out there, scanning their SD cards, still hoping that deep in the dogwoods, the thylacine might reappear. But let’s not get into that…
(Photo of thylacine in banner: ‘Thylacine, Adelaide Zoo, 1889’)