The Falklands Warrah

It is now extinct, but how did it get there in the first place?

Few people had heard of the Falkland Islands, in the South Atlantic, before they were seized by Argentina in 1982 (they call them The Malvinas) and the United Kingdom seized them back again after a war that lasted for just over two months.

The islands bear some resemblance to the islands of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides — barren and windswept, with very few trees and many miles of rocky coasts that are battered by Atlantic storms.

One interesting thing about the Falklands is that they used to be home to a now extinct species of canid — halfway between a fox and a wolf. The animal was called the warrah (Dusicyon australis). It seems to have fed on seabirds, sea mammals and invertebrates. When settlers arrived with livestock they hunted the warrah to oblivion. As a matter of fact, Charles Darwin visited the islands during his great voyage on HMS Beagle. He witnessed the warrah first-hand, and wrote about the animal in his journal.

Small islands are rarely home to large native mammals, because their ecology is such that they cannot survive the variables in terms of food availability. It seems likely, therefore, that humans brought domesticated warrahs from South America during the Neolithic period, just as they brought the dingo to Australia. The islands were uninhabited when Europeans discovered them, but prehis­toric evidence of human presence has been found in the form of stone tools and a preserved canoe. Those early settlers may have returned to the continent or simply died out.

These days, the fauna of Falkland Islands, apart from the sheep that form a major part of the colony’s economy, is dominated by seals and penguins.

For other similar pieces, see my Lists:

Animals, Fish, etc

The Wider World: Places of Interest

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