Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
The cassowary, a large, flightless bird found in Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Southeast Asia, can grow to five feet tall and 125 pounds. It is considered one of the world's most dangerous birds, due to extremely powerful legs with dagger-like spurs on the massive clawed feet. The cassowary is one of the only bird species known definitively to have killed humans and is easily recognizable due to the strange helmet-like structure on its head, called a casque.
On mainland Australia, the most recent recorded fatality occurred in April 1926 when Phillip McClean received an injury to the throat after running from a cassowary and falling to the ground. Attacking cassowaries charge and kick, sometimes jumping on top of the victim. Unlike emus, which reputedly kick backwards, cassowaries can kick in a forward and downward direction. They may also peck, barge, or head-butt. The commonest injuries they cause in humans are puncture wounds, lacerations and bone fractures. Serious injuries resulting from cassowary attacks are most likely to occur if the person is crouching or is lying or has fallen on the ground.
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Cassowaries will also kick or peck at doors at windows, sometime breaking panes of glass or screen panels. In these cases they are presumably attacking a reflection which they perceive as another cassowary. They will also kick or chase cars, again because they appear to associate the human occupants with food. Cassowaries dislike dogs and will attack them without provocation, presumably because feral dogs and dingos often prey on cassowaries. Between June 1996 and February 1997, six cassowaries were killed by dogs in the Cairns area and, of 35 cassowary attacks recorded by Kofron on dogs, 29 were in self-defence. Attacks on horses and cows have also been recorded and C. casuarius is anecdotally credited with having killed small horses.
Yikes. But the oddities don't stop there. Yesterday, the Wildlife Conservation Society published a study revealing that three species of cassowaries "produce a 'booming' call so low that humans may not be able to detect much of the sound. The researchers draw similarities between the birds' calls and the rumbling elephants make to communicate."
"When close to the bird, these calls can be heard or felt as an unsettling sensation, similar to how observers describe elephant vocalizations," said WCS researcher Dr. Andrew Mack, the lead author of the study. [...] The authors and their collaborators are now pursuing studies that examine the physics of low frequency sound production and reception. They speculate that the cassowaries' casque might serve a function in both, most likely sound reception. "These investigations are exciting because many dinosaur fossils exhibit casques at least superficially similar to those of living cassowaries," said Mack. "No one knows for sure what purpose these served in these dinosaurs, so further study of living cassowaries might provide clues to how dinosaurs communicated."
Crazy, man, crazy. Giant killer birds with subwoofers on their heads. The press release ends with the following sentence: "Coincidentally, the great early 20th Century dinosaur hunter, Barnum Brown, described the Corythosaurus, otherwise known as the Corinthian Helmet Lizard as 'cassowary-like'." Though nothing exists to make it logically so, the term "Corinthian Helmet Lizard" sounds for all the world like a sexual euphemism. Well, to me it does, anyhow.
TrackBackyou overdramatize this bird; maybe instead of stating what a "deadly killer" it is , you should be telling people that over 21 rainforest tree species REQUIRE the digestion of their seeds by the cassowary before they can germinate, because its true. You aren't giving these birds the credit they deserve
Posted by: yam at February 22, 2006 06:57 PMI think the way this author has described this animal makes it sound fascinating - The uniqueness of this animal is all the more reason to preserve and respect it.
Posted by: nick at October 5, 2008 03:02 AMI walk a road with cassowaries every day and have never felt threatened although other people seem to pass on stories of threatening behaviour and disemboweled tourists. The little stripy chicks want to follow me sometimes and that can cause concern to their fathers who are the primary caregivers. If they come too close it's a good idea to lift up an arm which makes you look bigger than them (to them). They have more to fear from us and our cars and dogs than we have from these magnificent rainforest birds.
Trelawney