Photo shows an inquisitive devil caught by our capture camera last night at Narawntapu NP

Trying to spot Australian mammals can be quite frustrating, as most of them are nocturnal. In the past we have spent hours with a torch scouring the bush at night with little success, even when the tracks in the sand reveal the richness of little bush creatures.

Australia's birds, by contrast, are highly visible and often extremely noisy, with the prize for garrulous squawking going to the cockatoos!



Yellow tailed black cockatoos share the top audio ratings with sulphur crested cockatoos, corellas and kookaburras! Cockatoos just seem to yahoo their way through life!



Bottoms up! At the other end of the avian ocker scale are the superb fairy wrens. Here a male in fading breeding blue has a discussion with one of his duller hued harem.

Here at Narawntapu, touted by Parks and Widlife as 'Tasmania's Serengeti', mobs of grey kangaroos appear first in the late afternoon on the grassy paddocks left over from when the area was farmed pre 1970. Then the first wallabies appear, tentatively. Even smaller pademelons pop into the open. Brush tailed possums descend from their tree top homes just after dark. The wombats have all sadly died from tick born mange here, but what about the huge diversity of smaller mammals: dunnnarts, bettongs and potoroos, antechinus, gliders and little possums, bandicoots, quolls, devils and others?



Easy days for this mob of forester kangaroos on the Spring Lawn paddock at Narawntapu




Male forester. Narawntapu's large population of the three larger macropods - roos, wallabies and pademelons - is why the 'Serengeti' tag has been used

We bought a cheap ($150) infra red camera while in Burnie which is normally used for surveillance. It works for elusive widlife, too. Strapped to a tree near a track in the Banksia bush it was triggered 40 times last night, with pademelons, bettongs, possums, a quoll and devil caught as they wandered to and fro.

The devil actually returned three times and seemed to be very curious about the camera. We suspect it actually climbed and gave it a nudge at some point!



Brush tailed possum, roaming in the gloaming



Pademelons - if pademelons are wannabe wallabies, bettongs are miniature pademelons! There are 50 odd species of roo like macropods in Australia and 20 more in New Guinea



Eastern spotted quoll



The same devil (?) triggered this capture camera photo a day later

The real Serengeti in Northern Tanzania, sad to say, is the last place anywhere on the planet like it. Nowhere we have been that uses its name as a parallel (Yellowstone's Lamar Valley for example) can really quite compare with that huge expanse of grassland and savannah, with its massive numbers and diverse range of megafauna. We can only hope that the sometimes corrupt government of Tanzania and its impoverished people realise just how precious their Serengeti is.

We have spent three very enjoyable days in this little national park. Tomorrow we head back to Devonport and take the night ferry to Melbourne.

Meanwhile, the fourth tropical cyclone in our part of the world, TC Linda, is now heading for the Fraser Island coast and Brisbane, but looks as if it will recurve and disintegrate before doing any damage.