Dancers from The Royal Ballet perform beside the Regent's Canal in London on August 30, 2020, one of three performances they put on daily on weekends to experience performing in front of a live socially-distanced audience. (Photo by Isabel Infantes/AFP Photo)

Farmers play with mud as they plant rice on “National Paddy Day of Nepal” in Dhading district on June 29, 2024. (Photo by Prakash Mathema/AFP Photo)

A person practices ski-joering at the Avoriaz resort in the French Alps on February 11, 2021. (Photo by Jeff Pachoud/AFP 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)

A mountain hare shakes off rain from its fur, in Findhorn Valley, Moray, Scotland in the second decade of August 2024. In summer, the hare’s coat is a grey-brown colour with a tinge of blue, making them hard to spot against the heather moorland. In winter, it changes to almost completely white for camouflage in the snow. (Photo by Will Hall/Solent News)

American model and actress Emily O'Hara Ratajkowski attends the Jacquemus Spring Summer 2020 show on June 24, 2019 in Valensole, France. (Photo by Arnold Jerocki/Getty Images)

in Qayyarah, about 31 miles (50 km) south of Mosul, Iraq, Sunday, October 23, 2016.in Qayyarah, some 50 kilometers south of Mosul, Iraq, Sunday, Oct. 23, 2016. Islamic State fighters torched a sulfur plant south of Mosul, sending a cloud of toxic fumes into the air that mingled with oil wells the militants had lit on fire to create a smoke screen. (Photo by Marko Drobnjakovic/AP Photo)

A male Sumatran elephant calf named Rocky Balboa, born on May 25, 2024, stands next to its mother, a 40-year-old elephant named Lembang, at the Surabaya Zoo during the introduction of the 3-month-old calf to the public in Surabaya on August 31, 2024. (Photo by Juni Kriswanto/AFP Photo)