Filming The World's Deadliest Bird | Wild Stories | BBC Earth

They're such a big animal and yet they are so capable of being quiet and just disappearing and those bright colours stand out so you you don't see them at all and then suddenly you'll get this flash of red and blue and they catch a tiny bit of light and they look absolutely stunning and then they're phantoms so they just become invisible. I'm Emma Knapper and I'm the producer of the Australia episode of Seven Worlds One Planet including being one of the directors on the Cassowary sequence. Australia is an ancient continent and it's also full of animals that you don't see in other places and surprising animals so the Cassowary for me was a nice opening to the programme because I think it captures both of those things. It looks a bit like a dinosaur, very few people have seen it before and does things that you might not expect. We went to one of the most beautiful locations, the oldest forest in the world in the Dane tree in Australia. I've done a lot of work in jungles and forests and to me that's the most magical place because it's full of plants that are almost unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs and you you walk in to these ancient forests and you really feel like millions of years ago it would have looked exactly the same, it's an incredible feeling. Filming in jungles including in the Dane tree, the sun comes out and it's one of the most beautiful places on earth but the rest of the time it's hell. Everything is out to get you so the plants are covered in spikes, big spikes that you can see, little spikes that you get caught on when you were looking at the big spikes, spiders, bugs, things that bite you. It's beautiful and it's also fairly hostile and of course the Cassowary that we were going to film is the world's deadliest bird. The males are a bit taller than me and the females can be six foot, females are bigger. They're very chunky and they've got incredibly big strong legs and claws longer than a velociraptor's so there's amazing claw on their foot. They're not inherently that aggressive birds but because they live in dense jungle I think when they're surprised their reaction is to try and kick you with that big claw and that's that's why they are the world's deadliest birds and why when you're filming them you have to do it with respect. Cassowaries are very secretive so we had to spend several weeks putting up camera traps to look for areas where we thought the Cassowary might pass. We wanted to film a male Cassowary with his chicks and at that time they're even more secretive and even more defensive than they would usually be. We really had to find just small areas in this in this forest where we could film and then the majority of the sequence everything where he's got his chicks was filmed in hides where we wouldn't frighten the Cassowary. I think what stands out the most for me from the Cassowary shoot was was seeing them for the for the first time that they're such a big animal and yet they are so capable of being of being quiet and just disappearing. The forest there especially when the sun is in is black it's so dark even in the middle of the day and those bright colours stand out so you you don't see them at all and then suddenly you'll get this flash of red and blue and they catch that tiny bit of light and they look absolutely stunning and then they just melt away and they're phantoms they just become invisible. The deep calls that they make it's so perfectly adapted to that forest which is really really dense you can hear them a long way away you hear that deep lovely noise and partly you feel it going through your body. The the dad does all the parental care which is maybe quite surprising to some people and what I wanted to show with that was that despite the fact that the forest there is a very uncomfortable dangerous place to live it's not really his size that's the key to his success it's actually how good he is at bringing up up his chicks and I like that kind of twist on what you might think about Australia. People think it is full of deadly stuff and it is but it's maybe it's not their ability to to fight and be deadly that's the key to the success maybe it's their parental care maybe it's their incredible adaptation so this deadliest bird in the world could also be a very caring parent and that's how he survives that ancient forest. The forest naturally has lots of lizards and snakes and bugs but introduced species are a massive problem in Australia that ecosystem has been in balance for millions of years and then when Europeans came across they bought a lot of animals from Europe that shouldn't be there. There's like eight pigs in there when was that? We put up loads of camera traps around the place and most of the footage we got back were of feral pigs. The wild boar are giant there and probably more dangerous than the cattery to the crew they destroyed our camera traps they dug up bits of the forest and those wild boar shouldn't be there they've got no predators there's too many of them and that's that forest is very delicate the soil is delicate the plants aren't used to the sort of disturbance that the wild boars cause they potentially kill things like cassowary chicks and eat chicks of other native animals eat eggs of other native animals the cassowaries are crucial for the daintree rainforest to survive they're a keystone species and this fruit in particular relies on the cassowary to germinate it goes through cassowary's gut and once it's done that it is obviously pooed out and it is able to grow in its own little pile of cassowary fertilizer. Australia's wildlife is found nowhere else it's incredibly special so what I wanted people to take away from the cassowary sequence and from the program I guess was that this wonderful diversity needs to be protected and I want people to to be amazed by the wildlife there to love it and then hopefully maybe protect it.