Adult Cassowary
The Cassowary, voted the 'most dangerous bird on the planet' by the Guinness Book of World Records, is the largest land creature found on the
Australian Continent and in Papua New Guinea; it is also the third-largest bird in the world, the first two being the Ostrich and the Emu. Since it is an inhabitant of Rain Forests and Rain Forests are rapidly shrinking, the Cassowary is high on the Endangered Species list.
The average height of a Cassowary ranges between 5 to 6 feet. It weighs around 70 kilos. The females are larger than the males, and also more colorful.
The Cassowary has a whitish patch about its head, the color tapering off to blue and purple from the head down to the neck. Here there are red wattles in front and an orange patch at the back. The red color of the wattles changes from pale to medium to dark depending on the bird's mood. The rest of the body is covered with coarse black feathers. The upper legs, under the long black feathers, are blue, and are otherwise grey or greenish-grey.
Baby Cassowary
Cassowaries have sharp beaks and casques on top of their heads - a casque is a grey, helmet-like growth of tough, rigid yet elastic skin. This is one of its most distinguishing features and what gave the
bird its name – in Papuan, 'Kasu-weri' means 'horned head'. Dominant birds generally have larger casques. When the bird runs, it lowers its head and uses the casque as a sort of battering-ram to clear out everything in its path.
become sexually mature at around 4 years and have a long life-span of around 60 years. You can say that the Cassowary is the totem-bird of Feminism. Here you have the females playing the field after laying a clutch of 3 to 8 pale greenish-blue eggs, the female Cassowary shows no more interest in her young.
The main diet of the Cassowary is fruit and fungi. But they are not fussy and also eat frogs, snakes, snails, worms, insects, dead rats and birds, and any other dead creature if it thinks it edible enough. They are foragers, not hunters.
These birds, as mentioned, are large and they have very strong legs, with sharp talons, the innermost five-inch one being especially dangerous. They can rip out your innards with one hard kick.
Cassowary Bird has extremely sharp sight and hearing and a loud raucous voice that can be heard 3 miles away. Usually they are wary of human beings and hide if they hear one coming and they are so good at it, that you could pass close by and not notice this huge bird. But, with more and more human encroachment of their habitat, familiarity is breeding contempt. There have been several incidents of Cassowaries attacking humans, and, in some cases, it is the humans that have fared badly from the encounter.
This is one formidable adversary if you make the mistake of riling it aside from the built-in knives in its kick-boxing feet, not to mention the equally deadly battering ram on top of its head, this
bird can run 50 km/hr and jump over a height of 5 feet. And, oh yes, it is also one hell of a swimmer. If it wasn't endangered and I didn't want to give it a bad rap like Spielberg did to the sharks, this bird, I'm telling you, would have a starring role in my home-remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 'Birds'.