ADAM LANGENBERG, REPORTER:\u00a0Just outside Hobart a popular visitor is back in town.<\/p>\n
INSTAGRAM:\u00a0 Neil will go to the beach when Neil wants to go to the f***ing beach.\u00a0<\/p>\n
REPORTER:\u00a0 This is Neil, a 2200-pound southern elephant seal that has become a local icon in Tasmania.\u00a0<\/p>\n
VOX POP:\u00a0 We all love him and he\u2019s the best.\u00a0<\/p>\n
VOX POP:\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen him yawn a few times and that made my day,\u00a0<\/p>\n
ADAM LANGENBERG:\u00a0 Neil the seal makes twice yearly visits to the same part of southern Tasmania. When he\u2019s not napping, he’s cuddling traffic cones or smashing up road signs often leaving a trail of destruction in his path.\u00a0<\/p>\n
CLIVE MCMAHON, SYDNEY INSTITUTE OF MARINE SCIENCE:\u00a0 He\u2019s in a difficult position, because he has all these innate behaviours and wants to spar and play and develop his skills and in the absence of other seals he\u2019s having to do this with traffic cones and bollards and large things that stand up that look like seals.<\/p>\n
GOPRI:\u00a0 People are kind of attached to him and want to see how he\u2019s doing every year, and he\u2019s getting bigger every year.<\/p>\n
ADAM LANGENBERG:\u00a0Gopri started filming after Neil interrupted a recent drive. The video he posted to Instagram has had more than a million views.<\/p>\n
GOPRI:\u00a0 I think it\u2019s just a one time thing. I just posted it randomly and it has just gone viral.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ADAM LANGENBERG:\u00a0Trish was travelling on the mainland. She booked a one-day trip to Hobart after seeing Neil’s videos.\u00a0<\/p>\n
TRISH:\u00a0 I got here at 6.30 this morning and was lucky enough that he just happened to be here right away, because I was willing to walk up and down the beach in the hopes that I\u2019d find him.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ADAM LANGENBERG:\u00a0 But with fame, there can be danger.\u00a0<\/p>\n
KRIS CARLYON, TAS. DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT:\u00a0 He weighs 1000 kilos and if you\u2019re in the wrong place there\u2019s a big big risk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ADAM LANGENBERG:\u00a0 Kris Carlyon has been in charge of ensuring Neil\u2019s safety since the seal was born on the Tasman peninsula in 2020. Scientists think his mother got separated from her colony and gave birth there by accident.\u00a0<\/p>\n
KRIS CARLYON:\u00a0Elephant seals are preprogrammed to return to where they were born.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As he matures he\u2019ll get bigger and bigger, and we expect him to top out at around about 3 tonne in weight and about 4 and a half metres in length, so think about your average Hilux size ute.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ADAM LANGENBERG:\u00a0 In 2022 a 600 kilogram walrus named Freya was deemed a public safety risk and euthanized by Norwegian authorities less than a month after she started flopping on boats\u00a0<\/p>\n
But if humans here keep their distance, the main danger Neil poses is to local infrastructure<\/p>\n
CLIVE MCMAHON:\u00a0 It\u2019s unfortunate of course that some of the things that he\u2019s interacting with are being broken or destroyed, but I think it\u2019s a small price to pay for having the privilege of have such a unique animal in a capital city really.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ADAM LANGENBERG, REPORTER:\u00a0Just outside Hobart a popular visitor is back in town. INSTAGRAM:\u00a0 Neil will go to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":775281,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[64,63,82094,363082,128,2801,338],"class_list":["post-775280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-elephant-seal","tag-neil-the-seal","tag-science","tag-tasmania","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/775281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}