Tasmania wildlife tour

Description of Tasmania wildlife tour

Tasmania is one of the world's true Noah's Arks, with many species that can be found nowhere else in the world, and this Tasmania wildlife tour helps you discover it all. When the land bridge flooded that separated Tasmania from the mainland, it became a life raft for species that would be wiped out by the arrival of the early settlers on mainland Australia.

Prolific, unafraid, at once beautiful, comical, weird and wonderful, Tasmania's wildlife will leave you captivated. With careful planning and local inside knowledge, the species of marsupial and monotreme that you can see in the wild include Tasmanian devils, Quolls, Wombats, Possums, Kangaroos, Wallabies, Pademelons, Bettongs, Poteroos, the Duck-billed Platypus and Echidna. Even the more common Australian species are highly unusual in their own way - such as the wild White Wallabies found only on Bruny Island. Even for non-birders, birds hold an irresistible appeal - such as the Cape Barren Goose, the Orange-bellied Parrot - the rarest bird in the world that breeds only in Tasmania, and the Native Hen.

This Tasmanian Wildlife Tour will take you to far flung corners of this extraordinarily diverse island, a landmass the size of Ireland, Switzerland or Sri Lanka. You will stay at little known properties on land that has been protected by its owners, guardians of nature and accidental eco-warriors, for decades. The accommodation may be rustic and simple in the more remote places but no less charming, and its true beauty is that the wildlife is free to roam and live without fear, meaning you are the privileged visitor who shares its habitat and learns from those who have spent much of their lives striving to protect it.

You will, with luck, witness the remarkable experience of Tasmanian devils, the largest remaining carnivorous marsupial with a jaw strength second to none, feeding in the wild. You will watch the world's plumpest Platypus swimming gracefully in rivers and lakes. You will quite possibly walk through a mob of Forester Kangaroos and wild white Wallabies and count dozens of Wombats grazing yards away from you without a care in the world. You will watch Little Penguins coming back from a day's fishing in the Bass Strait to their burrows and watch White-bellied Sea Eagles swoop to take fish thrown from your boat. You will take to the seas along the highest cliffs in the Southern Hemisphere to gasp in wonder at Albatross, Sea Eagles, pods of Dolphin and, in certain months, Southern Right, Humpback and Killer Whales on their migration north. You may not see a Tasmanian Tiger but you will certainly believe it exists.

While the tour is largely based on a self-drive, those who wish to leave their keys behind for a couple of days and put themselves in the hands of experts will benefit from superb private guiding by one of Australia's top bush trackers, and one of the country's most highly respected conservationists and birding experts. Those who love walking can spend four days glamping on Tasmania's very own Noah's Ark, an island off an island, where, like much of Tasmania, wildlife has been left to roam and breed freely and uninterrupted by man.

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