Birdwatching in Australia - Big Bird Gone Bad

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Outside Magazine February 2003

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Big Bird Gone Bad
The cassowary—Australia's six-foot-tall, 180-pound jungle bird—is a pushy, hard-pecking, head-butting, talon-swiping thug on the loose, and humans trespass in its habitat at their own risk. But on our writer's wary quest to confront this beast, he learns to spare a little sympathy for a fightless victim just fighting to stay alive.
By Charles Graeber


	(Illustration by Jason Holley)

I'VE COME TO AUSTRALIA in search of a giant dinosaur bird called the southern cassowary, but so far all I've found is Bruce: 300 pounds and 12 fluid ounces of forty-something bearded banana farmer balanced on a bar stool like a fat ballerina and squinting hard at his index finger.

"See, it's the claws you have to look out for," Bruce explains. He draws his finger down his T-shirt, throat to navel. "Like razors. They hook one in you and splat!—you're unzipped like a laundry duffel."

Bruce and I are sitting in the El Arish Pub, a living monument to cold beer and bad taxidermy at the edge of Licuala State Forest in Mission Beach, North Queensland, well up Australia's northeast coast. The El Arish is a banana man's grange, a place where plantation laborers pass rainy Sunday afternoons swilling VB stubbies, watching rugby, and swapping stories. With 12 feet of rain per year, Mission Beach residents have plenty of talking time. Luckily, the cassowaries that live in the area's jungles are providing plenty to talk about.

In April, a busload of Japanese tourists was held hostage by a hungry adult bird as it head-butted the vehicle's door. In May, rambunctious teenage cassowaries totaled five cars in a hotel parking lot, karate-chopping the hoods. In August, the birds chased a few hikers, forcing the temporary closure of Licuala. Then, in September, at the Australian skydiving championships in nearby Tully, parachuters gawked in amazement as an aggravated cassowary chased a ranger's motorcycle up and down the landing strip, attacking the bike with a five-inch talon and slicing the mudguard like a Ginsu through a can.

"Thing is, they're usually shy," explains Bruce. "Except when they eat fermented bush fruit. Then they get drunk, and mean." He signals for another beer. "And, mate, that's where your trouble starts."

Australia is famously full of deadly critters and tall tales, but the southern cassowary is both real and, occasionally, dangerous. Casuarius casuarius lives up to 40 years, and at over six feet and 180 pounds, it is Australia's largest land animal—a member of the 80-million-year-old ratite family and cousin to extinct giants like the elephant bird of Madagascar and the New Zealand moa. (The only other habitat for the southern cassowary and its two smaller cousins, Casuarius bennetti and Casuarius unappendiculatus, is the dense jungle of Papua New Guinea.) The cassowary's black, hairlike feathers carpet a body as furry as a sheepdog's, its neck rises from fluorescent crimson to deep blue, and its head is capped with a fin-like helmet of tough, keratinous skin. This assemblage is balanced on two three-foot legs capable of bone-crushing kicks and tipped with three formidable claws: one five-inch spike and two short, sharp hooks. And like most birds, the cassowary has a mating call; witnesses compare the male's to the wheezing of an old truck with a sick ignition.

In short, the cassowary is hard to miss. The reason I haven't seen one—the reason most people have never even heard of such a bird—is that cassowaries are also rare, and getting rarer. Down from an estimated population of 2,500 in 1988, there are just 1,200 birds today. In 1999, the southern cassowary officially became an endangered species.

"If you do see one," Bruce says, straightening on his stool, "don't turn your back. And don't run—they hate joggers. The pounding of feet triggers fight-or-flight in them, and they don't fly. . ."

"Hold on," I say. "You're honestly telling me that if I come across a giant, drunken dinosaur with razor claws and a battering-ram helmet, I should stand my ground?"

Bruce drains his beer and motions beyond the saloon doors, where the jungle howls with rain. "If you don't believe me, mate," he says, "head out there and see for yourself."

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