Royal Villaingull

A huge sparrowgull that rules the coasts, the powerful royal villaingull lets others do the work of catching its food.

Tribbfishers have become the dominant "seabirds" of the early hothouse era in a first, as they found themselves with a competitive edge through the extinction event at the end of the ice age and ensuing oceanic collapse thanks to their specialized eyesight. With filters over the lens which remove polarized light, these flying tribbets have superior vision to track underwater prey to birds, and even five million years later, seabirds have not regained former ranks. Yet birds have not abandoned life flying over the sea entirely. While specialized fishers like shadowskimmers died out in the collapse, generalists like sea ravens turned to scavenging on the dead and dying to get by, initially even benefiting from the mass die-offs of sea life. These birds were big as well as smart, and they could have filled the roles of extinct seabirds as soon as conditions improved, but rather than try and compete with tribbfishers, they went down a different path. They would become pirates by trade, mobbing more effective hunters for their food, effectively making their victims use their better productivity to provide for them, too.

Villaingulls are a small genus of very large, wide-ranging seabirds descended from the imperial sea raven. They rule the sea coasts where tribbfishers and some smaller birds gather in immense colonies to raise their young, and here they lay claim to the land and take a tax from all others, smaller and weaker, who live there. The biggest and most belligerent of all is the royal villaingull, a lazy 90 lb titan with a wingspan of up to 20 feet that is the largest flying bipedal bird currently living. These huge seabirds are so big that they can only reliably take flight thanks to sea winds and raised cliffs, and water take-offs in which their wings can aid them. They are stunningly patterned with blue, black and white, and males develop a pointed triangular crest of gold at the tips of their beaks, reminiscent of a kingly crown, which is used for display.

Royal villaingulls effectively rule coastal nesting grounds by force, being far larger than the tribbfishers as well as other related sea ravens. They live in social groups, packs centered around breeding pairs, or groups of several females and one male, and immature offspring of varied ages as well as other relatives which cooperatively raise the dominant pair's chicks throughout the year, with no set breeding season due to the lack of significant seasonal changes along the coasts. The parents in each pack function like the leaders of a gang, with all of the rest of the group following their orders. The packs claim territories along the coast of several linear miles, smaller in the more hotly contested prime nesting grounds of the tribbfishers and larger in less populated shores where food is harder to get. The younger members of the pack spend their days patrolling the air just ahead of the coast over the sea, where they swoop and target parent tribbfishers as they come in from foraging trips with stomachs and throats filled with fish and other marine prey.

 Hundreds of times a day, the massive villaingulls strike at comparatively tiny tribbats, missing many for they are less agile in the air, but hitting plenty enough to feed themselves and their families. Their goal is to slam the smaller animals down into a spiral toward the water, where in their panic they eject the food they are carrying to escape, allowing the pirate to take it for itself. Throughout each day, these gangs return to the nests of their parents and feed these stolen riches to both them and the chicks; the breeding pair of the pack may seem to do little work, and to spend their days at leisure, their only real concern keeping their chicks safe from other predators. But this is only true some of the time. The territories with the most tribbats are the most desired by all the other villaingulls, and so only the largest packs can lay claim to them. Other packs try to take them over frequently, and it is then that even the alpha pair join the rest to fight. Beaks rack together in the air as dueling giants battle, biting eachother's faces and inevitably coming to spiral down together and finish the fight on the water where they try to drown one another. These birds are very muscled and heavily built for their size, well-adapted for fighting and much sturdier than other birds of a similar wingspan. The larger pack usually wins, and few competing individuals are so evenly matched that one does not retreat before lives are lost, though sometimes dominant males will fight to the death, with the winner taking the loser's mate into his pack while driving away all grown offspring and killing those too young to escape.

Royal villaingulls may seem to be a menace to tribbats and smaller seabirds that must come to these coastal refuges to raise their young, and certainly they are. Yet the villaingulls are not completely malicious. They are manipulative and aggressive, but are not unreasonable. So long as they are given enough regurgitated food, they will not go through the trouble of eating the nestlings of the colony and fighting through the many protective parents. Further, their territorial nature means they will drive away other predators that would, serving to in fact help keep the colonies safe. Because they are vastly outnumbered by the colonies, even though some chicks may starve because the gangs have deprived their parents of hard-earned food, most get enough to grow up. In this way, the villaingull maintains its own protection racket, ensuring relative safety for its clients... for a price.