Members of the U.S. Army's Golden Knights parachute team perform during the Bethpage Air Show as part of a Memorial Day event at Jones Beach on Long Island, New York, U.S., May 25, 2019. (Photo by Johnny Milano/Reuters)

A couple shares a kiss as they celebrate New Year's Eve in central Istanbul's Taksim Square, in Istanbul, Monday, January 1, 2024. (Photo by Emrah Gurel/AP Photo)

A woman poses for photos in snowfall on a podium installed on International Women's Day in central St. Petersburg, Russia, Wednesday, March 8, 2023, with a police officer in the background. International Women's Day on March 8 is an official holiday in Russia, where men give flowers and gifts to female relatives, friends and colleagues. (Photo by Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)

A frozen public bench is seen next to a lake side due to the heavy wind conditions in Geneva February 8, 2015. (Photo by Pierre Albouy/Reuters)

A racegoer is given some water as he lays on the ground following 2017 Stakes Day at Flemington Racecourse on November 11, 2017 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

A woman holds a champagne bottle during New Year's celebrations in Bucharest, Romania, Wednesday, January 1, 2014. Tens of thousands of Romanians took to the streets of the Romanian capital to join parties and watch fireworks. (Photo by Vadim Ghirda/AP Photo)

Florin Bors, aged 8 from Bacau, northern Romania, wearing a bear fur takes a break from performing a holiday season ritual in Bucharest, Romania, Tuesday, December 16, 2014. In pre-Christian rural traditions, dancers wearing colored costumes or animal furs, touring house to house in villages singing and dancing to ward off evil. In recent years following the economic downturn in Romania, a European Union member since 2007, the tradition has moved to Romania's cities where dancers travel to perform the ritual for money. (Photo by Octav Ganea/AP Photo/Mediafax)

“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)