People train parrots during a parrot-training show held by Kuwaiti bird lovers in Jahra Governorate, Kuwait, December 7, 2020. (Photo by Xinhua News Agency/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

A woman releases birds as people celebrate the start of the Lunar New Year in Surabaya on February 1, 2022, which ushers in the Year of the Tiger. (Photo by Juni Kriswanto/AFP Photo)

A mischievous squirrel chases a turkey in a garden in Medford, Wisconsin in the second decade of January 2024. The garden’s owner, artist Cheryl Plautz, said the squirrels chase the birds “for fun”. (Photo by Cheryl Plautz/Solent News)

The Godson family had faced eviction over neighbours' complaints about the birds squawking and swearing. Now, after the family were targeted in a drive-by smoke-bomb attack over the birds they have upped and moved 200 miles from Hemel Hempstead, Herts, to Minehead, Somerset. And their pets join in their new idyllic coastal life – by walking along the beach with them on May 9, 2023. (Photo by Neil Hope/The Sun)

Climate change activists dressed up as black birds protest in St. Ives, on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Cornwall, Britain, June 11, 2021. (Photo by Dylan Martinez/Reuters)

As an airliner prepares to land, a bird takes off at the Gravelly Point park near Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Va. on December 23, 2018. (Photo by Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

In this photo taken Wednesday, April 30, 2014, a dragonfly sits on the nose of a Gharial, rare crocodile-like creatures, in the River Chambal near Bhopepura village in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The narrow 250-mile stretch of the Chambal is a place of crocodiles and jackals, of river dolphins and the occasional wolf. Hundreds of species of birds, storks, geese, babblers, larks, falcons and so many more, nest along the river. Endangered birds lay small speckled eggs in tiny pits they dig in the sandbars. Gharials, rare crocodile-like creatures that look like they swaggered out of the Mesozoic Era, are commonplace here and nowhere else. (Photo by Altaf Qadri/AP Photo)

“Cassowaries are large, flightless birds related to emus and (more distantly) to ostriches, rheas, and kiwis”, writes Olivia Judson in the September issue of National Geographic magazine. How large? People-size: Adult males stand well over five foot five and top 110 pounds. Females are even taller, and can weigh more than 160 pounds. Dangerous when roused, they’re shy and peaceable when left alone. But even birds this big and tough are prey to habitat loss. The dense New Guinea and Australia rain forests where they live have dwindled. Today cassowaries might number 1,500 to 2,000. And because they help shape those same forests – by moving seeds from one place to another – “if they vanish”, Judson writes, “the structure of the forest would gradually change” too. (Photo by Christian Ziegler/National Geographic)