Devils in the Dark

Audrey and I just got back from watching five Tasmanian devils eat a dead pademelon while we sipped on wine and had cheese & crackers. Suffice it to say this trip has had a few moments that we aren’t likely to ever repeat.

We started the day taking in some of the weird geologic features of the Tasman Peninsula. First we visited the Tessellated Pavement, which is an area of ancient silt that has been cracked by natural forces over time so that it looks like someone carved checkerboard patterns into it. I’ll admit that when I first read about it I wasn’t terribly interested, but it turned out to be really weird and unique. From there we headed down to the coastal seacliffs, including the absolutely massive Tasman Arch, which had to be several hundred feet tall and might have been the most impressive sea arch I’ve ever seen. After a short hike that included Audrey’s first wallaby we headed north towards Freycinet National Park. The route Google picked for us went from sealed roads to dirt roads until eventually there was a sign warning that four wheel drive was necessary for the next several kilometers. Since Hertz somehow decided that my reservation for an “economy SUV” meant “Toyota Camry”, and since we continually see Australians driving large pickups with snorkel attachments, I decided that our three inches of ground clearance was probably a bad match for whatever lay ahead, so we backtracked twenty minutes to a better road.

Our activity for the evening was the day’s big event. The odds of seeing Tasmanian devils in the wild are close to nil, so we instead booked tickets for Devils in the Dark, an after hours experience at East Coast Natureworld where they put out a dead wallaby or pademelon in their 35 acre devil enclosure and you watch the feast from an adjacent wildlife hide while drinking wine. When we booked it Audrey was excited but noted “this is so f’d up”, and it was an apt prediction about what we were about to see. We got to the hide with only three other people in the group, heard the sounds of devils roaming behind the drawn curtains, the guide left to stake out a dead pademelon, the noises got crazier, then the curtains were drawn and we were ten feet away from five angry devils screaming at each other, fighting over food, crunching bones, and generally acting like tiny little terror bears for the next hour. They’re an incredibly weird animal, with terrible eyesight, lopsided gaits, and awful tempers, but they were amazing to watch. In the space of an hour the five of them almost completely consumed the pademelon, bones and all, and never once quit fighting with one another and screaming their displeasure at having to share. As the guide noted, the devils got their name from their vocalizations, and back when Tasmania was a penal colony, some convicts would escape, hear the sounds of screaming animals in the pitch black, and return to the jail having decided that the prison was a better place to be than outdoors with whatever beasts were making such awful noises.

We drove home having had another amazing experience, and given that it was dark out we also got to see a few wombats, possums, and wallabies on the drive back as I carefully navigated the wildlife pathways roads of Tasmania under the stars.