Maria Island is a National Park on the east coast of Tasmania. It was named by Abel Tasman himself when he passed this way in the seventeenth century; there are lots of Dutch and French names here because they got here before the British got properly organised – in fact the whole place very nearly became French.

Maria is famed for several things – a convict settlement, a world-class fossil bed, and wonderful wildlife.

Here is an endemic Cape Barren Goose Cereopsis novaehollandiae. This animal is of very uncertain origin – it may be distantly related to the true geese & swans, or it may be a giant shelduck, or more probably it is in a separate bird family closely related to the extinct flightless goose of NZ and its appearance is as a result of convergent evoluton. Full genetic analysis will be needed to sort it out – but meanwhile since it looks, behaves and sounds like a goose we’ll continue to call it one. These birds are almost tame; this one is grazing the lawn in the convict settlement:

 

 

Here is another grazer, a Common Wombat Vombatus ursinus. These are nocturnal badger-sized marsupials related to koalas. They are quite delightful animals to watch moseying around on the grasslands as night falls, looking for all the world like Paddington:

Wombats have short legs as you can see which makes it very difficult for the young (carried in a pouch like all marsupials) to graze as they would just be dragging along the ground. So, uniquely, they have evolved a backwards facing pouch – the joey looks and grazes out of the rear, looking like a real life version of Dr Doolittle’s push-me-pull-you.

And here is a real rarity, a Tasmanian Devil Sarcophilus harrisii:

 

 

This is now the world’s largest remaining marsupial predator (the marsupial lion and the Tasmanian Tiger having been rendered extinct). It is about the size of a large Jack Russell and like most marsupials, noctunal. And what do you call a young devil? An imp, of course. This one is busy trying to catch chicks of the endemic flightless moorhen, resulting in an enormous racket in the dusk. Devils are suffering from a quite terrible facial cancer of modern natural origin and are in serious danger of extinction as a result. This one (disease free) has been relocated with others to Maria in an attempt to save the species.