Masked owls, wild devils and giant crayfish: inside the ancient forests of Tasmania’s Takayna | Trees and forests

Witnessing Takayna/Tarkine is a rare privilege. After I press through metres of the dense, dry shrubs that skirt the forest floor, the rainforest quickly opens into a dewy landscape of verdant greens bathed in golden light. The ground is a ballroom floor, moist to the touch, carpeted in soft mosses and punctuated by broad myrtle trunks. Tiny ferns unfurl towards the canopy, where shafts of sunlight streak through the treetops. It is an overwhelmingly beautiful place.

In a world experiencing an increasingly rapid montage of alarming climate events caused by a warming planet, Tasmania’s Takayna presents an alternate world, one that is primal and untouched by the ravages of industrialisation.

I pause for a moment on a fallen tree trunk, in a place where a rich network of delicate spiderwebs, lichens and leaves capture my gaze. Old-growth forests (forests unscathed by industrial-scale human development) are complex places. “They have structural components that are completely absent from a forest that could be 150 or 200 years old, so they’re essential for biodiversity,” says Prof Hugh Possingham, a conservation researcher and Queensland’s former chief scientist.

Achieving such structural ecological complexity takes aeons. These forests are a palimpsest of natural intricacy, where eras are written upon eras. Takayna’s rich and unique past is seen in the selection of species that have survived and evolved, and the density of life that is sustained today. In these ancient places, you can see the marks of time: hollows, fallen trees, growth on growth.

Immersed in the lurid greens of Takayna and listening intently to the strings of bird calls that stretch through the trees and tangle with one another,

THERE IS NO HIGHER recognition for a site of extraordinary natural value than Unesco world heritage listing. As it stands in early 2024, 266 areas spanning 112 different countries are inscribed on the Unesco world heritage list for their natural values. Australia has 20 world heritage sites in total: 12 listed solely for their natural values, four for their cultural values, and four for their combined natural and cultural values.

The Unesco-listed Tasmanian wilderness world heritage area is one of the largest conservation areas in Australia.

However, it doesn’t include Takayna within its borders, leaving it untouched by the protections afforded by the title. Today, only a fraction of Takayna is conserved under a national heritage listing.

To scientists, environmental activists and amateur appreciators of nature, this lack of acknowledgment has long seemed irrational and untenable.

Adding Takayna would provide world heritage protection and recognise the area’s outstanding universal value. Takayna is one of the largest areas of cool temperate rainforest in the southern hemisphere. It contains living reminders of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana and is filled with evidence of a long and deep history of Aboriginal connection to place.

There is broad consensus among those who have studied Takayna’s forests that the area exhibits a more than adequate showing for international recognition and protection.

The forest itself was preserved as a stowaway from Gondwana, an ancient supercontinent that saw present-day Australia, Antarctica, India, South America (and, at one stage, Africa) fused together until about 150m years ago. By about 50m years ago, these land masses had drifted apart, although Tasmania remained connected to mainland Australia by a land bridge until sea levels rose 12,000 years ago.

Evidence of this long (and rather ecologically productive) Gondwana connection still exists today in the classes of flora and fauna shared across baffling oceanic divides, such as the marsupials scattered throughout Australia and South America, the beech trees found throughout South America, Australia, New Zealand and parts of New Guinea, as well as leaf fossils found in Antarctica.

These ancient forests have also long sustained human lives and culture. There is abundant evidence that humans have had an intrinsic connection to the landscapes of Takayna for millennia. It’s generally accepted that Aboriginal people have lived in Tasmania for more than 40,000 years, and within that time, some of the largest groups thrived in the north-west, including within the borders of Takayna.

The forest and its bordering lands were altered, managed and maintained by these original custodians. There are numerous sites of archaeological significance between the Arthur and Pieman rivers, including middens, ceremonial stone arrangements, petroglyphs carved into coastal rocks and depressions left by semi-permanent beehive-shaped huts.

TAKAYNA PULSES WITH LIFE. It is home to diverse animal and bird species that scatter, soar, and scratch through this magnificent place. It is the preservation of these species and their homes that dominates the fierce fight to protect this land.

The area heaves with wombats, wallabies, platypuses, quolls and echidnas. The birdlife is particularly rich, with more than 100 species, including wedge-tailed eagles, grey goshawks and the critically endangered orange-bellied parrot found in the lush forests.

As I sit for a moment in silence (at least my own) in the company of the trees, I’m frequently captured by the low “tut” call of the pink robin, a small ball-shaped bird with an impossibly pink breast that bounces in and out of my camera frame with infuriating speed.

Takayna is also home to the giant freshwater crayfish, a gargantuan azure-shelled creature also known as the giant freshwater lobster, which grows up to a frankly absurd overall length of one metre and up to 6kg in weight. As observed by Bob Brown, environmental campaigner and former senator, it seems utterly implausible that the world’s biggest freshwater invertebrate species “is not in the Nile, Amazon or Mississippi but in the comparatively tiny west-flowing rivers” of this forest in Tasmania.

Crucially, Takayna is also a stronghold for the endangered Tasmanian devil. The devil population here remains relatively untouched by the deadly facial cancer that has decimated the species’ numbers. It is estimated there are only about 25,000 of these carnivorous marsupials left roaming Tasmania’s wilderness areas. The relative health of Takayna’s devil population has continued to surprise researchers.

THERE ARE MANY THINGS about Takayna that we don’t yet know. Rainforests, particularly ancient ones, are so incredibly ecologically complex they can shelter secrets for generations. For example, species can thrive in pockets of wilderness beyond our reach, eluding even the most skilled and committed researchers.

But it’s not just unknown species that are still being discovered in the area. There are also significant accounts of known endangered species that have been found to be flourishing here, in contradiction to all scientific knowledge.

One example is the Tasmanian masked owl. This owl is a subspecies of the Australian masked owl, a large bird with a broad, heart-shaped face and dappled white-and-brown feathers (the Latin word castaneus means “chestnut-coloured”).

Tasmanian masked owls are deeply territorial creatures, with each breeding pair occupying a massive territory of roughly 2000ha. Charley Gros, an ecologist and biodiversity researcher from the University of Tasmania, says this makes them wildly elusive. “They’re very quick; they’ll hide most of the time,” he says. “You’ll hear them when you study them and spend some time in their territory – but to see them is very, very rare.”

There are thought to be only about 1,000 individual owls left, and the only way researchers have found to track them is through blind navigation of forest calls over exhausting nights in the wilderness. Until very recently it was thought that masked owls exclusively inhabited dry eucalypt forests, such as the ones surrounding Hobart – largely because that is where people witnessed them on the rare occasion that one made its presence known.

However, in recent years, activists camped out in the dense forests of Takayna began to hear their calls. Gros says there was a huge amount of resistance to this idea from scientists, who told him that it simply wasn’t possible. He was told the rainforest was not the right habitat for the masked owl – and that they simply were not there.

Gros, intent on proving the masked owl’s existence in Takayna, marched into the forest with a photographer. They slept beneath the canopy for weeks, regularly hiking for kilometres back to the forest’s edge to recharge their equipment. “We didn’t know what to expect … but there was a tiny thread of hope, so we just held on to it very tightly,” he says.

The pair slept during the day and picked up the recording instruments and cameras throughout the night for weeks on end. They heard the calls while they sat awake in the darkness, but it wasn’t until their second week that one of the owls finally took an interest in them and landed at their campsite.

“It was at dusk,” Gros says. “She just sat there and [my photographer] was awake and he was able to put the light on and take the photo. She just hung out for five minutes and looked at us over the campfire. She was very curious, and it was a beautiful experience.”

Despite this remarkable interaction, it wasn’t until the pair returned to their homes that they realised what they had recorded during their time in the forest.

“I unpacked the SD cards and I started to listen to them and the first time I heard the calls I thought, ‘Yes! I got one’, but then there were one, two, three, four, five, six,” Gros says, smiling. “We ended up with 472 calls of masked owls and that was so significant in a place where they weren’t supposed to be.”

Habitat loss is far and away the greatest threat to the masked owl. Gros believes protecting Takayna through world heritage listing is all the more important because habitat preservation is key to the owl’s survival. “It’s very hard, because I’ve been studying them, and I know that there are some territories that have been logged and sometimes I will drive down those roads and all I will see are ghosts – the owls that we have lost,” he says. “They are gone forever. That’s why we need to protect their habitat.”

THAT TAKAYNA FULFILS THE criteria for world heritage listing set out by Unesco is an incontrovertible fact. However, whether or not an area of immense natural value fulfils these criteria, or those set out by any other organisation, should not dictate whether or not we protect them. While a world heritage listing ensures some legal responsibility for looking after a natural place, there are also inherent moral responsibilities that should not be overlooked.

When I ask Gros what he thinks about the world heritage proposal, he agrees that, as a researcher, Takayna more than adequately meets the Unesco criteria. But there is also something innately spiritual in the way he speaks about the place – something that should not be ignored when we are assessing a place’s ecological value or attempting to whittle this down into legislative jargon. “It’s beautiful,” he says. “We talk about the protected species but what about the fungi on the ground? All the ferns? It’s just marvellous, and on a personal level, it just makes me happy when I go there.”

World heritage values are deeply important when it comes to the administration and management of conservation areas. But they aren’t everything. Geologist Grant Dixon agrees that conservation is not just about assessing the value of any particularly beautiful natural area within the Unesco criteria. We should protect these places simply because they are there, and because we are their custodians, and have an inherent responsibility to look after them for future generations.

“Being in these places, the personal relationships that you have with them when you visit are very special – and obviously also rare because the areas themselves are increasingly rare,” Grant says. “So I think it’s important as well as desirable to retain [these places] so that the next generations (as well as anyone else that’s around now) can also have the potential to experience them.”