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

You Are Here:

Home >> Big Bird Gone Bad (Cont.)

Today's Question
What should you do if you run into a cougar in the backcountry? answer

What is the number one backcountry skill people should learn? answer

Today's Question
What are the five best environmental movies of all time? answer

What are the greenest colleges? 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.)

THESE DAYS, WHEN A BIRD gets mauled by dogs or hit by a car, they call Cameron Allanson, 41, the ranger in charge of the Mission Beach Management Unit, which oversees five national parks in prime cassowary territory. In the battle to keep Mission Beach from becoming another Cairns, Ranger Cameron is a frontline foot soldier.

The Mission Beach cassowary population is down from roughly 70 adults in 2000 to approximately 40 today, making it the most vulnerable in Queensland. Driving around, it's easy to see why. Mission Beach is a sleepy town smack-dab between the Gondwana rainforest and the white-sand beaches of the Coral Sea, and, as with the Cairns of 20 years ago, both birds and people want to live there.

Today is Cameron's day off, and he's keen to spend it with his wife, Shayne, puttering around their shaded porch with a refrigerator full of cozy-wrapped beers and a fresh pack of rollie ciggies. Like many houses in the Wet Tropics, theirs is on a small lot backing directly onto the rainforest, only a few miles north of town. It features a sort of exposed basement equipped with laundry room, office, and cold-storage freezer. In this case, the freezer does not store hamburger.

In the past four months, Cameron's jurisdiction alone has lost four birds to car accidents. To keep the cassowaries from crossing the road, a 165-mile "cassowary corridor" has been proposed, and the town council has launched an awareness campaign for local drivers. Until the speed bumps and CAUTION: CASSOWARY signs kick in, more cassowaries are likely to succumb to traffic, and then the big freezer, where Cameron keeps cassowary roadkill until it can be shipped to the Atherton University biology department in Cairns for study.

"Ah, mate," Cameron says, pulling back the thick black plastic to expose a frozen bird's ankle, thick as a wrist. "So many things you don't know when you first start a job like this. Like when you pick up the dead bird, you have to fold it up before it gets rigor mortis. When it stretches out hard at its full size, it won't fit."

According to Cameron, the birds do actually seem to dislike joggers. He's watched more than one Lycra-clad tourist go screaming down the road, Walkman flailing, cassowary in pursuit. Still, he reckons that most attacks aren't motivated by a hatred of Reeboks but by something simpler: food and sex.

The food issue is familiar. Park animals start associating people with food, and the next thing you know, it's your sandwich or your life. The sex issue is more complex. While the female birds roam the jungle during the months of May and June (the only time of year they'll tolerate a male's presence) on their annual sex bender, males stay put for up to 50 days, protecting the three to five giant, pale-green eggs the female lays and then tending to the chicks. Perhaps it's this arrangement that makes male cassowaries a bit touchy about sharing turf. Every mating season, Cameron sees it all: jealous males kicking out their reflections in car doors and windows, or disoriented and walking into, well, everywhere—pubs, houses, churches, and, increasingly, roads.

Last season, at a four-star luxury retreat in Cairns, a brood of adolescent cassowaries found its way to the hotel's pool. One of the birds snatched a purse off a bikinied tanner's chaise lounge. For the next ten minutes, the guests were treated to the sight of a grown man in a Speedo chasing the big bird round and round the patio. Finally the cassowary lost its footing on the slick Mexican tile and skated hard into the lunch buffet. Apparently, at that point, it dropped the purse.

Page: