The thick rainforest on the island of New Guinea as well as the Tropical north of Australia is home to a bird that looks straight out of the world of dinosaurs. A blue neck, black plumage and red wattles and most of all, what looks like a helmet on top of its head. This bird is the cassowary, often dubbed the ‘most dangerous bird in the world’.
But today, this bird is itself in grave danger. Targeted hunting, habitat loss and fragmentation have left less than 5,000 birds in Australia. The loss of the cassowary could be dangerous for Australia and New Guinea’s rainforests as the bird disperses seeds through its scat.
Every year, World Cassowary Day is observed on September 26 to draw international attention to the reasons these birds are important for the world at large and need to be protected.
Rainforest bird
‘Cassowary’ comes from the Papuan words ‘Kasu’ (horned) and ‘Weri’ (head). According to the Government of Queensland in Australia, these birds lived in the rainforests of northeast Queensland, from north of Townsville to the tip of Cape York at the time of European settlement in 1788.
“Today, there are three remaining populations, one in the Wet Tropics and two in Cape York,” the government portal notes.
These birds are also found on the island of New Guinea, just across the Torres Strait from Australia, and divided into Indonesian-controlled Irian Jaya or West Papua and the former British colony and now independent country of Papua New Guinea.
There are three species of Cassowary. The southern, or double-wattled cassowary (Casuarius casuarius) is the largest of the three. It inhabits lowland rainforest, is also found in eucalyptus forests or forested swamps, according to the US Library of Congress.
The Northern or single-wattled cassowary (Casuarius unappendiculatus) inhabits the coastal swamps and lowland rainforests of northern New Guinea.
“The dwarf cassowary is smaller than the other two species of cassowary, usually weighing around 50 pounds. Their habitat is at a higher altitude, and they are generally found in more steep mountainous terrain,” as per the Library of Congress.
The cassowary offers essential ecosystem services to these rainforests by increasing it. A study in March last year titled The southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius johnsonii ) remains an important disperser of native plants in fragmented rainforest landscapes stated that, “The study shows cassowaries have a flexible foraging strategy that has enabled them to persist in rainforest‐fragmented landscapes. They remain a significant disperser of seeds from native plants between rainforest patches, and as such, cassowaries remain essential in maintaining native plant diversity within these fragmented patches.”
Shades of danger
The cassowary has earned a bad rap. But there are reasons for this. These birds stand five feet tall. They are flightless and ground-dwelling. “Their legs are also used for delivering strong kicks, and they can use their sharp dagger-like claws, up to 4 inches long, to slice and puncture any animal that is a threat, including humans,” as per the US Library of Congress.
An Australian government Pet risk assessment of the southern cassowary in 2011 stated that there have been 150 recorded attacks (by cassowaries) on humans, eight of which have resulted in serious injury, with one attack resulting in death.
“The eight seriously-injured victims suffered puncture wounds, lacerations, cuts, and/or broken bones, one of them subsequently dying,” it had added. In 2019, a man in Florida was killed by his pet cassowary.
Despite this, other experts feel that the cassowary’s infamy is unwarranted as the ostrich and emu kill more humans than it. There is more danger to this bird from humans than vice-versa.
A paper, Human impacts on two endemic cassowary species in Indonesian New Guinea (2015), stated, that “cassowaries avoid areas frequented by humans, which could be evidence of an impact of hunting on cassowary distribution. Previous work has suggested that logging activities are a prime threat to northern cassowary populations; our results expand upon this by identifying hunting as another potentially critical threat.”
The analysis added that “it remains possible that pigs affect cassowary populations by depressing the availability of fruit (i.e. exploitative competition) or attracting humans, a shared predator”.
“Cassowaries are functionally important as dispersers of plant seeds. Their loss through overexploitation could therefore have important consequences for forest,” it concluded.
The world’s
largest frugivorous and omnivorous bird is in danger of becoming extinct. Which
would be a pity since it has roamed the planet for so long.
