I’ve been visiting Tasmania every year for the past five years, specifically seeking out wildlife-watching opportunities. I’ve explored the south mostly on day trips from Hobart and spent two weeks road-tripping around the north west on an itinerary we designed specifically to maximise our chances of seeing wildlife in Tasmania.
Along the way, I’ve watched wombats grazing around my feet, searched for white wallabies on Bruny Island, encountered echidnas on walking trails and waited after dark for wild Tasmanian devils and spotted-tailed quolls to appear. I’ve also spent a considerable amount of time staring at apparently empty stretches of water waiting for a platypus to surface.
Some places have been much more rewarding than others. In this guide, I’m giving you my top five places for seeing wildlife in Tasmania, along with tips on exactly where to look, when to go and how to give yourself the best chance of seeing the animals.
1. Maria Island
I rank Maria Island as the best place to see wildlife in Tasmania, but with a caveat: it depends on how you approach your visit.
Most people plan their day around one of the island’s walks, usually the Painted Cliffs or the Fossil Cliffs. And you’ll certainly see some wildlife along the way, particularly wombats and pademelons.
But if you want more than a passing glimpse of these animals, you need to slow down, pay attention and ninja around smaller areas, looking and listening for signs of movement and giving the animals a chance to accommodate your presence.
Do that, and you can sit quietly among grazing wombats, watch southern brown bandicoots frenziedly digging for food, find Bennett’s wallabies snoozing beneath the bushes and watch Forester kangaroos grazing on the open grasslands.
For wildlife watching, winter is my favourite time to visit Maria Island, by far. The wombats are out and about for much of the day, and I’ve also found bandicoots particularly conspicuous in winter.
Common wombats
For wombats, head up the hill from the jetty and look for them grazing on the slopes between the jetty and Darlington. Find yourself a spot at least a couple of metres away and sit quietly for 10 minutes or so. Before long, you can find yourself surrounded by wombats going about their business.
If you happen to sit in the direction a wombat is travelling, it may wander right up to you. I’ve had them come up and sniff my boots. More details in my guide to encountering wildlife on Maria Island.
Southern brown bandicoots
Southern brown bandicoots are easy to overlook. They are small, ground-dwelling marsupials with pointy faces who spend much of their time digging for insects and other food.
I’ve never seen as many bandicoots active in daylight in a relatively small area as I have on Maria Island. I counted half a dozen individuals in the coastal stretch between Hopground Beach and Darlington settlement. All of them were absolutely unfazed by my presence. As long as I stayed a couple of metres away from the animals, I could watch them frenziedly dig for worms for as long as I wished.
Bennett’s wallabies
Bennett’s wallabies are less abundant. I’ve often found a couple snoozing under the bushes around the campground, so it’s worth checking the shaded edges rather than expecting them out on the open grass.
Forester kangaroos
Forester kangaroos sometimes browse on the hills around the jetty. If you don’t see any there, take the short walk over the hill towards the Maria Island cemetery in the late afternoon. There are usually a few grazing on the open grasslands around it.
It’s quite a photogenic area in the golden afternoon light. And it’s also a good spot for keeping an eye on the approaching ferry.
Staying overnight
If you stay overnight on Maria Island, you also have a good chance of seeing a wild Tasmanian devil. I haven’t stayed overnight myself, but everyone I know who has stayed on Maria Island has encountered devils after dark. That’s backed up by regular reports from other overnight visitors of devils wandering through the campground and around the buildings at Darlington.
You can camp at Darlington or stay in the old Penitentiary, which has basic bunkhouse-style rooms with mattresses and wood heaters. You’ll need to bring your own bedding and food, and there are no showers or electricity in the rooms. It’s rustic, but when I walked past last winter, the guests were sitting out on the sunny lawns looking remarkably content with the arrangement.
2. Cradle Mountain
In contrast to Maria Island, Cradle Mountain is all about walking. The trails provide good opportunities for spotting wombats, Bennett’s wallabies, pademelons and echidnas. And Cradle Mountain gets extra points for its stunning alpine scenery. Here you’re looking for wildlife among button grass plains, glacial lakes and some of Tasmania’s most spectacular mountain landscapes.
For wombats, the best area is Ronny Creek. Come here on an early shuttle and either hang out for half an hour or take the Cradle Valley Boardwalk across the alpine grasslands.
We also saw an echidna and a Bennett’s wallaby on this walk in the late morning. We had another up-close encounter with an echidna on the Dove Lake Circuit in the late afternoon.
In my experience, though, the best place to see Cradle Mountain’s wildlife up close is the grounds of Peppers Cradle Mountain Lodge, immediately beside the national park boundary.
The grassy areas around the gift shop are particularly good spots for seeing pademelons, Bennett’s wallabies and wombats up close. We started and finished each of our days at Cradle Mountain with a visit to Peppers. You can find more photos and details in my guide to visiting Cradle Mountain.
Another great opportunity for spotting wildlife at Cradle Mountain is the spotlighting tour. Apart from wombats and pademelons, this is your best chance for spotting a Tasmanian devil or an eastern quoll – my favourite carnivorous marsupial.
3. Mountain Valley Wilderness Holidays
Mountain Valley Wilderness Holidays in Loongana, about 64 km from Devonport, is a different kind of wildlife-watching experience altogether. Here you get to watch wild Tasmanian devils and spotted-tailed quolls from the cosy warmth of your log cabin as the animals visit your front lawn at night.
As nocturnal carnivores, Tasmanian devils are notoriously difficult to see in the wild. Mountain Valley is the only place I’ve found in Tasmania where you can actually watch wild Tasmanian devils, not just catch a glimpse of one dashing away, but observe one for a while.
Over two nights, we watched two different devils and two or three different spotted-tailed quolls come and go from the lawn over the course of about two hours.
And that’s just the nights. Mountain Valley is remote, tucked into the Loongana Valley beneath Black Bluff, with the Leven River running through the property.
I had my closest-ever encounter with an echidna here, where we ended up lying practically nose to nose on the button grass. See the video in my guide to Mountain Valley Wilderness Holidays.
The river is also a reliable spot for platypus. Len, the property owner, accompanied us on a platypus watch and we did see one, although, as is often the case with platypus sightings, it was fairly distant and in poor light.
But Len also tipped us off about a much better place to see platypus. It turned out to be a real gem, and has become number four on this list.
4. Tasmanian Arboretum
There are several platypus watching hotspots in Tasmania, and I’ve had better luck at some than others. But the absolute best place to watch platypus in Tasmania is the Tasmanian Arboretum in Eugenana, just south of Devonport. What makes the arboretum particularly good is that platypus are active throughout the day and often swim close to the shore or under bridges over the creek.
We arrived around 2 pm and saw our first platypus within minutes of arriving. It swam very close to the bank, and we had fantastic views of it. There was only one more visitor at the lake, and the three of us watched the platypus for a few minutes.
Watching platypus is like watching whales – you see the animal on the surface, and then it dives for about 60 seconds. Then, you try to guess where it is going to emerge.
After the first sighting, we saw a platypus every 15 or so minutes. It is difficult to judge how many different individuals we saw, but at one point, we saw three different platypus at the same time. We couldn’t believe our eyes.
The platypus are found in Founders Lake. We noticed that they repeatedly swam from the open water towards particular spots along the shore, so it’s worth watching both the lake and its edges. Most of the time, the first sign of a platypus was simply a trail of ripples moving across the water.
Our particularly close encounter was with a platypus feeding in the shallows of the creek. There seemed to be a food-rich patch on the bottom, and that platypus spent a good 10 minutes feeding there. All within no more than two meters of us.
We watched it dive, then saw the bubbles come up, then a cloud of silt would spread below the surface, and then the animal would re-appear and float spread-eagled like a flotation device. It was utterly relaxed and stayed in the same patch all this time. Once it was ready to move on, it swam under the bridge and headed towards the island in the middle of the pond. You can find more details in my guide to visiting Tasmanian Arboretum to watch platypus.
We also saw a Bennett’s wallaby and a few pademelons at the Arboretum, but platypus absolutely stole the show. Some of my readers have since followed my recommendation and reported similarly good platypus sightings at the Arboretum.
5. Bruny Island
Bruny Island is not quite the wildlife haven Maria Island is, but it does have one very special wildlife experience: the chance to see its famous white wallabies, which are Bennett’s wallabies with a naturally occurring genetic condition called leucism that gives them white fur.
Normally their white fur would make these wallabies particularly conspicuous against the dark green vegetation. On Bruny Island, however, they don’t face some of the large mammalian predators found elsewhere in Tasmania, including Tasmanian devils, which may help explain why the white form has persisted here.
The best place to look for white wallabies on Bruny Island is around Adventure Bay, particularly towards the southern end of the bay. The main search area stretches from Captain Cook Holiday Park and nearby Lockleys Road, through the grassy paddocks and roadside verges along Adventure Bay Road, to the area around Bruny Island Cruises and East Cove at the end of the road. From there, you can continue on foot along the Grass Point Track towards the start of the Fluted Cape Track, keeping an eye on the open grassland beside the track.
We found a white wallaby contentedly browsing among its grey-coloured companions in a paddock off Adventure Bay Road, near where the road terminates beside Bruny Island Cruises. The wallabies were quite unfazed by our presence, and we spent 10–15 minutes watching them.
If you’re visiting Bruny Island on a day tour from Hobart, make sure you book a tour that specifically mentions looking for white wallabies. Some tours include a stop in an area known locally for wallaby sightings.
If your itinerary gives you free time at Adventure Bay, that’s another opportunity to look for them. Instead of sitting down for lunch, walk towards the Fluted Cape car park and continue along the Grass Point Track for as long as your time allows. If you can make it to the start of the Fluted Cape Track, about 800 metres along, the open grassy areas around here are particularly good places to search.
Another adventurous wildlife experience on Bruny Island is a three-hour wilderness cruise along the island’s spectacular southern coast to the huge seal colony at the Friars. Conveniently, Bruny Island Cruises departs from Adventure Bay, right in the heart of the white wallaby area described above. So you can combine two of Bruny Island’s best wildlife experiences in the same part of the island.
And if you stay overnight between September and February, there is one more wildlife experience to add to your Bruny Island itinerary. Head to The Neck around dusk to watch little penguins emerge from the sea and waddle up the beach towards their burrows.
Short-tailed shearwaters also return to their burrows here after spending the day feeding at sea. A viewing platform overlooks the colony, so The Neck is one of the easiest places on Bruny Island to watch both species after dark. More details in my guide to best wildlife experiences on Bruny Island.
Final thoughts on places to see wildlife in Tasmania
With a large proportion of Tasmania protected in national parks, reserves and other conservation areas, it is one of the wildest states in Australia, and there are many more opportunities for seeing wildlife in Tasmania beyond the five places in this guide.
You can watch Forester kangaroos grazing at Narawntapu National Park, see little penguins coming ashore along the north-west coast, and look for platypus in Deloraine and even along the Hobart Rivulet.
But the five places in this guide have been the most reliable for me. Between them, they offer a wide variety of species in relatively small areas and, in many cases, opportunities for remarkably close encounters with wild animals.
More Nature Adventures in Tasmania
- 6 Things to Do in Hobart for Nature Buffs, Including Platypus Spotting & the Aurora
- Hastings Caves and Southern Forest – a journey to Far South Tasmania
- Gorgeous Beaches in Tasmania: North-West Coast
- The Absolute Best Place to See Platypus in Tasmania – The Tasmanian Arboretum
- 8 Best Day Trips from Hobart for Nature Lovers
- Edge of the World Tasmania: Visiting Arthur River’s Wild Coast
