The world's most dangerous bird

...is, according to the Guiness Book of World Records, the Cassowary. It is native to Tropical North Queensland, although I gather that there are very few left. Basically they can grow to like 6 feet tall, look sort of like Turkey-Emus, and are super deadly. For instance: a boy was killed in the rainforest by a kick in the chest from a cassowary. Or, a more interesting story that I heard today: this martial-arts expert had a weird fascination with fighting Australian animals. He had snuck into zoos to fight kangaroos, etc. He decided to go up against a cassowary and was found dead in the cassowary pen by the zookeepers. Crazy. This is an intense bird. So, needless to say, Jon and I have been kind of obsessed with seeing these weird looking, super dangerous birds. The Rainforest Dome was supposed to have one, but they didn't. The Sydney zoo didn't. We were disappointed.

But... today, we went up to the rainforest via the "Skyrail," which was hokey but fun. They had a bird habitat. The bird habitat had two cassowaries. Obviously we went. We started asking the guy at the front all sorts of questions, like whether they ever had cassowary feedings that we could watch or whether anyone ever got hurt. He said there were no feedings, but that every now and then, they will come up and take a grape from you. The male was busy guarding the eggs, but he said the female was still out and about. We bought a food bag for $2 that included seeds, nuts, grapes, and corn cobs. He said not to expect anything, but that we were welcome to try.

And try we did.

Here's our first glimpse of the cassowary through the trees.

Jon holds out a grape, to no avail.

We get bored and feed other birds.


Return to the cassowary. It's still far away, I just get better at using Jon's camera. Check out the deadly claws.


The cassowary is intrigued by the grape and the "cassowary calls" that Jon tries to make up.
(I should point out that he can get squirrels and other woodland creatures to come to him by making noises. It's kind of cool and also pretty creepy.)


Almost there...


Success! High fives all around. Except for the cassowary, who would destroy us with a high five.

I fed the cassowary a corn cob. We weren't sure we liked each other, though. (I realize this looks a lot like the rainforest dome picture. Except this bird is actually scary.)

See? Mutant dinosaur-emu-turkey.


Creepy.

Anyway, we ran out of corn cobs, grapes, and peanuts (which the guy at the front was amazed that we got it to eat).

We played with some other birds.

For some unknown reason, one decided it would be a good idea to land on my head.

And this one had a mullet.

So, even without the birds, it was a pretty neat trip.

We took the Skyrail up to Kuranda...


and we took the scenic train back down.


We saw some nice waterfalls...

and the most ridiculous sweater ever.


Rainforest. Yay!