Creatures of Tasmania

Hi, I'm Nick. I'm going to talk about famous animals in Tasmania and Australia. The first one I'd like to speak about is the Tasmanian Devil. It's Tasmania's most famous animal. It's a really interesting animal because it's a marsupial, so it has a pouch like a Kangaroo.

It also eats meat. It's like a little dog that eat meats. It's black. It has little white patches and makes the most tremendous sound - really screechy and sounds like the devil. Hence the name. Really interesting but at the moment, they have a facial tumor, so it's a really bad disease which has diminished numbers quite a lot, so it's really sad. But hopefully they'll come back.

The second animal I'd like to talk about is the wombat. Now the wombat is really interesting because it's the size of a small dog, again, but has lots of grey hair, eats gum leaves and grasses and things like that, and has a really tough back, so it can be a little bit dangerous sometimes. They can cause some injury to tourists and other people which aren't familiar with them. They don't bite but they just kind of move their back quite quickly towards you. But they're lovely animals. The babies are so cute. A baby wombat is maybe the cutest animal in the world.

Another animals I'd like to talk about is the wallaby. Now, the wallaby is a small kangaroo, and there's many wallabies in Tasmania. They live in forests, where kangaroos live in grasslands, so they're many, many wallabies in Tasmania, and they also have 'Joeys' we call them, or baby kangaroos or baby wallabies, and they sit in the pouch and are just, again, very, very cute animals. And you can actually feed them by hand. They're very tame, sometimes.

Another animal I'd like to talk about, that's the echidna. Now the echidna is a very strange name because it's a really strange animal. It actually lays eggs. It looks like a porcipine, but lays eggs, so very strange. Maybe like a bird in that respect, but yeah, lays eggs, has a long spines and also has a poison gland, so underneath it's body, there's a poison gland, so if it gets scared it can be - again - quite dangerous. So, yeah, really interesting animal. Not quite a mammal, not quite a bird. Somewhere in between.

But my favorite animal is the platypus. It's maybe the strangest animal in Australia, and there's lots in Tasmania. The platypus has a bill like a duck. It has a tail, maybe like a beaver. It layseggs like an echidna, and has a poison gland, also like an echidna. It lives in rivers and streams around Tasmania and around Australia, so really an interesting animal, but really hard to see. Only sometimes, at night, if you're very patient, you can see them, but really notoriously hard to find and hard to see, but my favorite.