did you know september 26 is world cassowary day? no? i don’t blame you, neither did we. luckily it was heavily advertised at the daintree discovery center: get free face painting and cassowary poo, better known as jelly beans, for all kids.
there was also a cassowary puzzle hunt on at the lync haven where we stayed and whoever got all the answers right (the answers were hidden along the cassowary trail) got a sour snake. nat, as always, preferred the real thing.
so what’s that cassowary thing anyway you ask? fair enough, it’s not like they are the picture postcard australian animal. the cassowary is the other large flightless bird that calls australia, and apparently parts of papua new guinea, home (that would have to do with the last ice age and how ocean levels were lower then, creating a land bridge between australia and png).
cassowaries grow get up to two meters tall and can be aggressive, which possibly excludes them from the top ten animal selfie list. i believe there is actually one confirmed fatality of a cassowary attack but for some reason the brochures don’t mention that.
the cassowary is arguably somewhat less loveable than the fluffy koala or the bouncy kangaroo, especially with its bony head crest (nat says it’s called a cask) that looks like it could split trees, the evil stare that betrays it as a distant cousin of the t-rex and of course the murderous claw that looks and works pretty much like a large kitchen knife.
on the other hand they wear a lot more make-up than their relative, the emu. there are many similarities between the two: while the females lay the eggs it is the males that incubate them (for 50 days) and who rear the young. the young are all brown and stripy and have a lot to learn from their dads about how to live in the rainforests of northern queensland.
their diet is mainly rain forest fruit, about 150 different kinds, which they swallow whole. and as we have seen, a lot of it seems to come out the other end almost like it went in. no, we’re not kidding. we took photos!
this somewhat disgusting process is quite important for the rainforest as well; some plants appear to require ‘cassowary processing’ for their seeds to work: only when eaten and subsequently discharged by a cassowary will these seeds be able to grow into a tree.
we are very excited to have seen our first cassowaries. one, inexplicably named thornton, came through our camp on cassowary day eve (there may not be such a thing).
on cassowary day we saw thornton and his chick again and later ran into (not over) another one with a bigger chick on the way north. that is really good to see, the cassowaries are endangered. being the massive birds they are their only real enemies is … us. cars in particular seem to do the most damage.
they may not be cute and cuddly but we still love them and would like to see them survive. happy cassowary day!