• Canon EOS 5D Mark II
  • Adobe Photoshop CS5 Windows
  • 2016:01:23 22:44:17
  • 0.067 s (1/15) (1/15)
  • f/4.5
  • 3200
  • 2016:01:05 11:59:54
  • 4.97m
  • No
  • 235.00 (235/1)
image

Shot Notes

This is a Southern Cassowary. Like many of Australia’s animals it is weird, wonderful and potentially lethal. The bird weighs as much as 85kg, stands almost 2 metres tall and has a 12cm dagger like claw on each foot. Imagine an armed Emu. It lives in the dense forests of northern Queensland and Southern Papua New Guinea. As for eating the cassowary, it is said to be very tough. Australians stationed in PNG were advised that it “should be cooked with a stone in the pot: when the stone is ready to eat, so is the cassowary”

Cassowary-Foot

8 Responses to “Southern Cassowary”

  1. 1
    muonman:

    How far away from the claw were you? My mobile ran out of credit BTW.

  2. 2
    Jason Benz:

    Less than 5 meters according to the camera exif data.

  3. 3
    muonman:

    Didn’t think to look at exif. The focal length is a givaway as well, 235mm. Thanks.

  4. 4
    Jason Benz:

    It is a useful feature of the blog.

  5. 5
    Mollypath:

    The symbol of our college magazine when we were at Sir John Cass College in the 60′s :-)

  6. 6
    Benz World Blog » Wallaman Falls:

    […] crop of deadly snakes and spiders, there is a native stinging tree which releases a neurotoxin and a bird capable of delivering a fatal […]

  7. 7
    Benz World Blog » Wild Cassowary:

    […] is a wild Southern Cassowary. I had seen one before in Australia Zoo but it was standing still in an enclosure about 5 meters […]

  8. 8
    Benz World Blog » Cape Tribulation:

    […] area is known as Kurangee by the Eastern Kuku Yalanji Aboriginal people. Meaning place of many Cassowaries. It was later named Cape Tribulation by the English explorer James Cook shortly after he discovered […]

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