FERAL CATS, NATIVE ANIMALS ENTICED WITH FEATHER BOAS IN TASMANIAN FORESTS, WITH SURPRISING RESULTS

It seems that just like pets, feral cats — along with an eclectic ensemble of native species — are fascinated by feather boas, a finding that may allow scientists to better study animals in the wild.

Feral cats kill more than a billion native animals a year and have a massive impact on Australia’s environment.

To tackle the problem, scientists are trying to understand where cats are and what species they share a habitat with.

Feather boas and other lures are being trialled in Tasmanian forests to entice feral cats and native animals to wander past camera traps.

Camera traps, despite the name, don’t restrain animals, but instead take their photos.

“Camera traps are the bomb diggity,” explained Alexandra Paton, PhD student at the University of Tasmania.

“They are the new way of monitoring larger vertebrate species, particularly mammals, we’ve got a network of them across Tasmania … they’ve been really successful.”

Ms Paton’s PhD research is trying to establish the effectiveness of different lures.

She set up 64 camera traps over four sites in southern Tasmania and tested the effectiveness of four lures:

Food: a cage of meat

Smell: tuna oil

Visual: the feather boa

Null: just a post and nothing else

The scientist had read that international researchers had luck with feathers, while others hung up old CDs as visual lures to attract cats.

“I decided to go with feathers and then I figured the easiest way to get feathers en masse is just to hit up [the craft store] and get feather boas,” Ms Paton.

Feathery lures

The success of these fancy, feathery lures came as a surprise to Ms Paton, who thought that without an inviting smell or something to snack on wild animals might pass them by.

“I had no hopes for these feather boas, I thought they would be a trash lure, pretty much a null,” she said.

When she started servicing her cameras and seeing the photos of cats, quolls, pademelons, Tasmanian devils and even a wedge tailed eagle visiting the boas, she was flabbergasted.

“It feels like every animal has interacted with these feather boas,” she said.

The wedge tailed eagle attacked the boa and then proceeded to stomp around and inspect the camera.

Pademelons had a different approach.

“They come up and they just cuddle it,” Ms Paton said.

“It’s weird.”

One pademelon returned to canoodle with the feathers every night for four nights, until Ms Paton removed the boa. A photo was taken the following night when it returned.

“It’s probably just chance [that the pademelon looks so sad],” she said.

The feral cats interacted with the feather boas like, well, cats.

“We had two separate incidences of a cat finding a feather lure and just tearing the crap out of it,” Ms Paton said.

“[They were] lying on their back like you would see a cat at home with the feather boa on their belly, in a death grip just clawing at it.”

Are feathers better lures than food?

The research is still in its very early stages and Ms Paton has only started “eyeballing the data”.

To get a better understanding of how often each species visits each lure and how those lures could be best used in the future, she needs to run statistical analysis.

Ms Paton is hopeful that feather boas might provide a longer-lasting option than food or scent lures that tend to be effective only for 10 days to a couple of weeks.

“As a researcher, that kind of sucks because you have to go back out to these cameras that you could otherwise leave in the environment for six months to a year,” she said.

“So, I wanted to use a lure that we could leave out indefinitely.”

Lures with meat tend to draw the attention of Tasmanian devils and quolls.

“They just come back and spend heaps of time there, trying to get that last morsel out of the cage,” Ms Paton said.

While the photos of gorging quolls and devils are “quite entertaining”, Ms Paton suspects these larger marsupials may deter cats, meaning they do not get picked up on the camera.

Ms Paton said there might be such a diversity of animals interacting with the feather boas because each individual spent less time there compared to the meat traps, meaning animals were less likely to scare each other off.