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Home | Animals | Birds | Cassowary Bird
Cassowary Bird
| Scientific classification | |
|---|---|
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Aves |
| Order: | Casuariiformes |
| Family: | Casuariidae |
| Genus: | Casuarius Brisson, 1760[1] |
| Species | |
Description
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.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.
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.