One of the strangest Australian birds, Cassowary belongs to a group of flightless birds called ratites, which evolved on the Gondwana continent and are not found in Northern Hemisphere. Not all flightless birds are ratites. Cassowary is Australia’s second largest ratite after emu. Here are some photos, and information about its diet, babies, cassowary habitat in wet tropics and where in Australia you can see ths impressive bird.
Wet Tropics Cassowary Bird Cassowary (Casuarius sp.) is a stocky 1.5m-tall bird with black hairlike plumage and large feet with three toes, long blue neck, red wattles, and a large horn on the top of its head. Whether the horn works as protection, signal of dominance or shovel for foraging, is not fully known but it is impressive.
Cassowary Habitat The Australian Southern Cassowary (Casuarius casuarius) is a tropical flightless bird which is also found in New Guinea. In Australia, it only lives in the tropical rainforests of north north Queensland.
Cassowary Diet It is usually solitary and it has a large home range in which it feeds on fallen fruit, fungi, snails, frogs, fish, eggs, rodents and even carrion. It swallows the seeds whole and is the most important disperser of seeds of many species of rainforests trees - if cassowary populations decrease, so will its habitat. It is silent as it walks through the vegetation and easy to miss when walking past, but it will hiss if threatened and it has got a 10-cm spike on the inside toe of each foot so don’t scare it.
Cassowary Babies It breeds during the dry season between April and August. Female lays 3-4 eggs on the rainforest ground, and as in all ratites, takes off leaving the male that incubates the eggs and looks after the young for nine months after hatching.
Cassowary Mission Beach Cassowary bird is not easy to see in the dense rainforest. Most often it is seen crossing the roads, or walking along roadsides where people have been feeding it. This is really dangerous for this beautiful bird - it is lured to roads but being run over is the main cause for decrease in its populations. They are also known to have become agressive because of feeding and with their sharp claws and strong horns, they can kill people. The best places to see cassowary bird are in Mission Beach, Daintree National Park and Atherton Tablelands in north Queensland, but you need a bit of luck to see it in the wild. If you don't, you can see it in most of Australian zoo parks and animal sanctuaries such as Melbourne Zoo in Melbourne, Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Brisbane, Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast, Billabong Sanctuary south of Townsville and Kuranda Wildlife Noctarium north of Cairns.
NOTE: This website is written in British English, which is the English we use in Australia. You will find words like "traveller", "harbour" and "realise", and they are all correct in the language used in Australia.
