Birdwatching in Australia - Big Bird Gone Bad (Cont.)

You Are Here:

Home >> Big Bird Gone Bad (Cont.)

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine February 2003

Page:

Big Bird Gone Bad (Cont.)

AROUND MISSION BEACH, "out there" is the North Queensland Wet Tropics—a 264-mile-long sliver of 100-million-b.c. jungle running south from Cooktown to Townsville. This particular patch of green is the oldest jungle on the planet, pre-dating the extinction of the dinosaurs by 35 million years. The cassowary evolved amid the Wet Tropics, thriving on figs, quandongs, and other distinctive fruits. Unfortunately, this area is choice habitat for humans, too. And when humans and giant birds share the same real estate, sooner or later they're going to clash.

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, tennage cassowaries totaled five cars in a hotel parking lot, karate-chopping the hoods.

No comprehensive data on cassowary attacks exists, but it's possible to make estimates. In 1999, Christopher P. Kofron, a ranger for the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, compiled a list of 221 attacks reported since the mid-1800s. Scattered among the lists of people chased, charged, kicked, pushed, pecked, jumped on, and head-butted are some serious injuries. The only death—that of a 16-year-old hunter named Phillip McClean, who caught a claw to the jugular—occurred more than 75 years ago.

Most cassowary crimes are misdemeanors. Typical was the assault on Doon McColl. In April of 1995, Doon was jogging through Mount Whitfield, a park two hours north of Mission Beach, when she heard a noise on the trail behind her.

"I turned and saw this huge black beast," she tells me. "And I just thought, Oh, fuck." Doon ran, then climbed a tree. The bird waited below, pecking furiously at its own neck. Hours later, it finally wandered away. The very next week, Doon's boyfriend, Ray Willetts, was chased through Mount Whitfield. He tried to lose the bird in the jungle and spent the day flailing through thorns and lawyer vines while the cassowary trotted effortlessly behind. "He came home crosshatched and bleeding and like ÔMy God, Doon, it was Jurassic Park!' " Doon recalls.

With millions of acres of wide-open spaces, it's hard to imagine Australia having suburban-sprawl issues. But along the highly coveted tropical northeast coast, one of the country's fastest-growing regions, forest is being razed at an average of 16,549 acres per year, and more than 370,000 people live within 20 miles of cassowary habitat.

"When you fragment the cassowary's environment, it's basically a death sentence for them," says George Mansford, the 68-year-old chair of the Australian Rainforest Foundation, a nonprofit conservation group. "The remaining bird populations are concentrated in just a few islands of rainforest connected to one another by thin corridors of jungle. When you cut these corridors with house lots and highways, you have problems. And that's exactly what finally happened at Mount Whitfield."

Mount Whitfield is an island of rainforest surrounded by sprawl from the booming 130,000-person coastal city of Cairns. Its 741 acres are sandwiched between the airport, several housing developments, and the Captain Cook Highway.

Ten years ago, this was the epicenter of cassowary attacks, and today the Mount Whitfield trailhead still bears a menacing NO JOGGING sign. But these days, a three-hour trot here will yield nothing more terrifying than a bush turkey. In 1996, Cairns's last cassowary, a 30-year-old female locals called Blue Arrow, met her fate in a suburban backyard.

Cassowaries are experts at gutting dogs, and Blue Arrow was no exception. In fact, the old girl was successfully moving in on two bull terriers when 73-year-old Jim Barry tried to pull the dogs away; instead he ended up knocking the big bird off her feet, and off her game. The cassowary managed one last kick—sending Jim flying into an adjacent vegetable patch—before the dogs took her throat.

"And that's the pattern," says Mansford. "Habitat fragmentation, human interaction, dead birds. I don't want the next generation of Australians to have to visit museums to see one. But unless we change the way we think about development in this country, the cassowary is doomed."

Page: