Big, colourful, endangered but overlooked: an investigation into the potential of the cassowary as a new tourist drawcard

The aim of this article is to explore the potential to use the cassowary, a large colourful but endangered bird as a tourism attraction in the Cairns region of Northern Australia. More specifically the research examines what level of interest exists in viewing endangered animals. It also considers the importance of wildlife as a motivation for visiting the region and it determines the settings (i.e. zoo or the wild) that visitors would prefer to view wildlife in. For this purpose a total of 540 surveys were collected during the period from July 2009 to March 2010. The findings show that viewing wildlife is in fact an important motive for visiting the region and that there is the possibility to adopt the cassowary as a signature animal in destination promotion