‘Dinosaur bird’ stares down extinction with habitat, climate change
WITH legs like a velociraptor and a striking neon blue neck, the southern cassowary cuts a fearsome figure in the rainforests of north-east Australia. It is best to admire these human-sized birds – and their rapier-sharp 10cm talons – from afar.
“It's a modern-day dinosaur,” said Peter Rowles, the president of a community group protecting the endangered birds.
Fiercely territorial, when threatened they hiss and make a deep rumbling boom.
“When you first look at them eye to eye, that can be intimidating, because they've got big eyes, and they look straight at you and they do look a bit fierce,” said Rowles.
These flightless birds are only found in Australia, New Guinea and some Pacific islands.
The Australian government lists them as endangered and estimates about 4500 remain in the wild.
They are considered a “keystone species”, meaning they play a vital role in maintaining biodiversity and help spread seeds in the rainforest.
If cassowaries go extinct, the rainforests will suffer.
“We thought if we could save cassowaries, we also could save enough habitat to keep a lot of other species alive,” said Rowles.
His group is doing what it can to save these formidable birds, which stand 1.5m tall and can weigh up to 75kg.
This includes making signs urging drivers to slow down, re-designing roads to better protect native habitats and running a cassowary hospital for injured birds.
The main threats to the cassowary are car strikes, clearing of native habitats, dog attacks and climate change.
“Cassowaries are not aggressive when they're treated well,” said Rowles, with few recorded deaths caused by the species.
A young Australian boy was killed in 1926 after he chased the bird, who severed his jugular vein, while a Florida man died in 2019 when his pet cassowary attacked him.
In the past 300 years, about 100 of Australia's unique flora and fauna species have been wiped off the planet.
This rate of extinction will likely increase, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
“There is so much that has to be done and resources are not available to have a significant impact,” said Darren Grover, WWF Australia's acting chief conservation officer.
“We're looking at about 2000 species on the Australian government's threatened species list and more and more species are added to that list yearly.”
The Australian government has a national recovery plan under way to save the cassowary, including working with Indigenous and conservation groups. Much of the country's conservation efforts focus on protecting keystone species, a concept developed by zoologists in the 1960s.
Grover said this was the best approach when resources were limited, because it provided flow-on effects to other animals in that habitat.
But this strategy could only go so far, he warned.
“Cassowaries are amazing species,” he said. “But be careful because they are naturally cranky birds, they are big and powerful and we need to give them some space.” |