A Giant Bird Killed Its Owner. Now It Could Be Yours.

There will be colorful macaws, lithe lemurs and cackling Kookaburras for sale at an event billed by organizers as “the dispersal of the animal estate of Marvin Hajos.” But the animal that is likely to get the most attention is the giant bird that killed Mr. Hajos this month.

That bird — a hulking, flightless cassowary with a daggerlike claw on each foot — will go up for auction on Saturday alongside about one hundred other exotic animals that Mr. Hajos, 75, kept on his property near Gainesville, Fla. (Several other cassowaries are also slated to go on the auction block.)

Mr. Hajos fell between two cassowary pens on April 12 and was attacked through the fence by at least one of the birds, said Jeff Taylor, the deputy chief of Alachua County Fire Rescue. When rescue workers arrived they found him grievously injured on the ground between the two pens. An angry bird stood in one of the pens.

“A couple of people from our crew had to dodge the bird themselves,” Mr. Taylor said. “The bird was obviously agitated and was trying to come at them through the fence, but they were quick enough to get themselves out of the way of the bird.”