Daintree Rain Forest

19 Feb 2013 • idlewords.com

To the cassowary, the Daintree rain forest is a big, year-round buffet. Like coffee hipsters who won’t touch beans that have not first passed through a civet cat, some plants in Daintree won't even germinate until their seeds have transited a cassowary. The bird's nitrogen-rich turds give seedlings a huge advantage in the race for the canopy, and like doting parents frantic to get their children into Harvard, plants will go to great trouble to get their fruit into a cassowary. The itinerant and hungry bird is happy to oblige, eating its fill under a variety of trees that have specialized in making it happy, then walking several kilometers until it's timefor another feast. It deposits new generations of fruit trees as it goes. The cassowary eats, the plants grow, and both sides of the arrangement are happy.

I've never read a more interesting paragraph on bird crap in my life.