Last day in Tasmania

 Before breakfast, we again searched for platypus in the Derwent River.

We had two sightings, but not as good as the previous day. After breakfast, we started towards Hobart. We spent several hours at the Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary en route. The sanctuary is dedicated to the rehabilitation of injured native Tasmanian animals, and the visitor fees fund the Wildlife Rescue Service. The rescue service is an amazing enterprise. Throughout Tasmania, if you see an injured animal (often from car encounters), the expected protocol is to stop, check on the animal, move it to the side of the road, and check whether Joey is  present, and if so, whether it is okay even if the mother is not. Then you call the rescue service, and they arrange for pickup and treatment, or if needed euthanasia. They have 22,000 trained volunteers who help with this (which in a country of about 500,000 people is impressive). They also have a network of veterinarians, and a full time medical clinic of their own. They answer 15,000 calls per year, and the vast majority of the animals brought in for treatment are successfully released back into the wild. The animals in the sanctuary are either too injured to survive in the wild (for example a blind echidna, or an echidna that lost a leg from a dog attack, or an albino pademelon) or are undergoing treatment ( for example an orphaned wombat not old enough to release yet). The third category are pets that have been rescued or bequeathed to them, who are too habituated to humans to be released. One such pet is a sulfur-crested cockatoo named Fred, who at 108 has outlived two owners, and who received a letter from Queen Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting on the occasion of his 100th birthday. 

We finished the day in Hobart, the second oldest city in Australia (1806). We are staying in a Victorian city mansion built in 1878 and managed by the great-grandson of the builder. We took a walk to the Botanic Gardens, which like our lodging is on a hill called “the Queen’s Domain” in the middle of Hobart.  We walked through scrubby meadows teaming with Eastern Rosellas, brightly colored parrots that have moved in from the mainland. We also heard and then found a flock of Yellow-tailed Black-cockatoos munching on pine cones. One bird decided that the foliage was interfering with his supper, so he cut clumps off pine needles with his beak and dropped them, as well as rejected bits of pine cone, onto the street below. He made quite the noisy mess.  On our way back to our lodgings we saw two Southern Brown Bandicoots.

Pictured: Madge the baby wombat, blind echidna, albino pademelon, yellow-tailed black-cuckoo