Lured by the bright lights of Dubbo, a Northern Quoll (nicknamed Stowie) recently hitched a ride with a family all the way from Cooktown to the Central West, before a bit of a holiday at Taronga Western Plains Zoo.

Late last year the Lyons family — Dan, his wife Peta, kids Aleisha, 22 and Jack, 20, and Smudge the cattle dog — drove their Prado station wagon through the night from Far North Queensland to visit family in the Orana.

“When we got to Dubbo, my daughter went to get her bag out and she said, 'Oh, there's a quoll in here!’,” Dan said.

“When you look back, the dogs were chasing something around the car as I was packing for the trip, and they must have chased him in there just before we left,” he added.

The family had unknowingly brought a stowaway with them more than 2400 kilometres from their property north of Cooktown, where threatened Northern Quolls are abundant in the surrounding bushland.

“Smudge was trying to get into the back with the luggage, but we still didn’t pick up that there was something in there and, because it was raining so heavily, we just kept driving through the night until we got to Dubbo,” Dan revealed.

“We thought ‘we can’t just let it out here!’,” he added.

With stowaway northern quoll Stowie now in the care of Western Plains Zoo, the Lyons family on their way home to far north Queensland from Dubbo. Photo: Supplied

It was then that the zoo came to the rescue.

“We took it to the quarantine building, but it ended up going into the lining of the car; it was a big anticlimax for everyone I think as it didn't even get out of the car!

“They gave us a cage trap and some food for bait and we set that up in the car, but he was so small he kept getting out; I ended up having to modify the trap, but we caught him and took him to the Zoo the next morning,” Dan explained.

Nicknamed ‘Stowie’ by the family, the juvenile male was admitted to Taronga’s Wildlife Hospital where he underwent a full health check.

“I think his journey was probably quite stressful for him, being in a very strange environment with people, but considering all of that he actually held up beautifully,” Senior Veterinarian Dr Alisa Wallace said.

“Once he was here, he didn’t waste any time tucking into his food and that bodes really well for him going back to the wild; he’s been really resilient,” she added.

After six weeks at the Hospital, Stowie doubled his body weight and received one final health check to confirm he was ready to be translocated to the tropical north.

“It was really quite special to see a Northern Quoll down here, but it’s a threatened species which made it even more important to get him back home,” Dr Wallace said.

“He's finally back out there, where he's meant to be,” she concluded.