BAN #382: Wary cassowary, Taming the perilous skies

[The planetary nebula M 2-9, winds from a dying star. Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Legacy Archive / Judy Schmidt]

I recommend

Something I think you’ll like

This is a bit niche, I know, but if you were a concert/marching band geek in high school like I was (and in college, and, yeah, in grad school too) and you like that sort of music, then you should sit yourself down, crank the volume way up, and listen to David Holsinger’s “To Tame the Perilous Skies”, because holy wow.

I played bass trombone for a long time, and I was competent if not good, and there was never a time, ever, where I could’ve handled this piece. Yegads. Still, in my opinion this is the single greatest piece written for band I have ever heard.

If you can, set your ears to pick out the French horns and listen again to the last three minutes or so, maybe starting around 11:15. It’s nuts. It just never stops, never even slows, even when you think it will. It keeps hammering on right up the end.

I love the imagery in this piece, too. When it opens, I imagine a slow, cold desert dawn, the sky crisp and brightening, and then the Sun peeking over the horizon. Things seem still and calm for a moment, and then… the first of the fighter jets comes screaming overhead.

After that, well, mayhem.

I do enjoy imagining little scenes as I listen to music. Makes it even more fun.

A Bit o’ Science

The entirety of science is too much for one sitting. Here’s a morsel for you.

I have one more Australia trip story for you, so please indulge me (the first was here, and here’s a silly follow-up). It’s actually scientifically appropriate for a recent news story.

When I was in Oz I took a side trip to a koala garden where they had quite a few different local animals. Besides being able to hold a koala (their fur is like a Brillo pad, which I did not expect at all, and their claws were very long and sharp) we also saw lots of interesting birds including kookaburras, and various parrot-like ones (like galahs and cockatoos).

I remember I wandered off a bit, and was standing next to a short wire fence maybe a meter high. I don’t recall what I was doing, maybe tying my shoe or something, but when I stood up again and turned I found myself face-to-beak with a cassowary.

I’ve been in a few tough scrapes in my time; minor car accidents that were moments away from being serious, watching a wildfire encroach on my house, nearly being thrown by a horse down a steep hill.

But I have never been as close to soiling my underwear as when I stood there staring down this 1.5-meter-high death chicken.

[The cassowary I stumbled on in Oz in 2004. Credit: Phil Plait]

Cassowaries are dinosaurs. We joke about that with some birds, but with cassowaries it’s no joke. They stand as tall as a human and can run up to 50 km/hr, so if one wants to catch up to you, you’d better learn how to fly. They can’t.

They tend to be shy but can be pretty ornery if provoked. And you do not want to provoke them. The inside toe on their feet is equipped with a 5-centimeter long razor sharp claw that can inflict serious and even fatal damage if they decide you’re not their kind of person. There have been a couple of hundred attacks recorded with few deaths, but when you suddenly find yourself staring one in the eye with nothing but a wire fence between you, the low statistical odds of colonic evisceration seem less important.

As it happens this one was clearly used to having humans around, and I was probably particularly non-threatening. It spent a moment sizing me up, made a decision, and then walked off. I stood very still for a moment, assessing both my safety and my bladder, then carefully backed off and found something less terrifying to deal with, like a cone snail or an eastern brown snake.

[Cassowary feet, evolved over hundreds of millions of years to murder anything that walks. Credit: Dezidor / Wikimedia Commons CCA 3.0]

So it was with considerable amusement and bafflement that I found a recent news story about how ancient humans may have domesticated cassowaries as early as 18,000 years ago!

Apparently humans in New Guinea may have collected eggs and raised the cassowaries themselves, thousands of years before we did this with chickens. Scientists found egg shells in various archaeological sites, and used a new technique to determine how old each egg was when it was harvested. They found the eggs were all late-stage, meaning the chick was near hatching when the eggs were cracked open. They postulate either these ancient humans were eating the chicks (still done in some areas) or were hatched on purpose. The eggs had no indication of burning, so it’s likely the chicks were hatched.

Cassowary bones from meatier parts of the body were found around the sites indicating the birds were hunted, so it’s possible these people decided to raise the chicks themselves and save the difficulty of the hunt. There were no cages found so they may have been free range.

[This adorable chick will grow up and cheerfully terrorize anything that it decides is worth the effort. Credit: Andy Mack]

This takes a considerable amount of intellectual prowess, as you might expect — learning how to snatch the eggs, let them incubate, then raise the chicks themselves, as well as figuring out the need to do this in the first place — as well as a level of bravery (or foolhardiness) I myself don’t possess. If someone in my area were raising free-range murder birds I’d probably move. Cripes.

Don’t diss ancient humans. They were smart, they were clever, and they clearly had a lot less fear of perambulating assassination delivery systems. Respect.

Et alia

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