Mittens

Mittens are a group of flightless, totally wingless wading birds descended from the water snuffle, native to northern Wahlteria and southern Striata in the Pangeacene, which have developed a mobile "hand" of tentacles on their snouts with which they are able to manipulate food items. These structures - the hand-shaped resemblance of which provide them their common name - differ from the trunks of extinct elefinches in that the tentacles are not based on the nostrils and are instead supported by rings of cartilage. Further, they originate from the upper and lower jaw and thus surrounded the mouth, giving the mitten an appearance that has been compared to a duck with an octopus for a face.

Mittens are carnivores and feed mainly on invertebrates, though they will also catch fish. Though they can swim, their hind legs have elongated and they now find food much more frequently by wading, lowering their snouts into the shallows and feeling around for buried mollusks and crustaceans. When one is discovered, the mitten immediately contracts its tentacles, pulling the hapless prey directly into the mouth. If it is something soft-bodied, like a worm, it is swallowed with little effort. More often, however, it is something hard-shelled and to access the meat inside of a clam or a crab the mitten crushes it between its jaw plates, which contain raised ridges of keratin along their edges that provide a firm grip. The mitten's crushing power originates not from its lower jaw, which is comparably weak, but its upper bill. This structure is heavily muscled and detached from the brain case in such a way that it can slide back and forth, allowing the mitten not only to break through the shells of its food sources but also to chew its food afterwards, grinding the upper jaw against the less mobile lower one and chopping its prey into more manageable pieces. This chewing method is notably different from that of the vivas, which powered their mastication with a mobile toothed tongue, but is fundamentally not too dissimilar from the grinding methods of the molodont tribbetheres, albeit far more primitive.

The eyesight of mittens is of greater importance to them than it was to their more aquatic ancestors and their vision is more acute, particularly in regards to detecting movement. As a result of their ancestry as burrowing animals, however, they cannot see in full color, being able to see in the blue and yellow spectrum but not in the red or green. Despite this, they are still able to view ultraviolet light.

Mittens are fairly intelligent birds; their brains are proportionally large, and they are capable of tool use, manipulating stones and using them as anvils to break open the shells of mollusks too large to fit in their mouth. To do this, a mitten secures the sides of the prey with its feet and holds it in place with its weight, raises it head in a high arc will holding a stone firmly in its tentacles, and then brings its head down rapidly forward and back to smash the rock against the front surface of the shell. The best stones are kept for long periods of time and carried by their owners, defended against others who might wish to steal them for themselves and overall being given an extremely high value, for they allow an individual to access food sources otherwise unnattainable. There is one situation where a mitten will intentionally give up a prized anvil stone, however - but only in the name of love.

If a male mitten wants to woo a female he likes, he needs to prove to her that he will be a good provider to her and her young, and one of the best ways to do so is to demonstrate his competence in tool-use, cracking the largest and hardest mollusk it can find with a suitable anvil rock. Only the strongest and most intelligent males will be able to do so well, and these are the ones the female wants to sire her offspring. If a male demonstrates his ability to open a large food source and shares it with her, the chances are very good she will accept him and they pair. Even if he is not so successful with his on the spot performance, however, a female may still consider a male if he can prove that he will be good for her in other ways... for example, if he is generous. If a female is not persuaded by a full belly, she has another method of testing her mate: she will attempt to take his anvil stone. If he resists her, she leaves, needing nothing more from him. If, however, he not only tolerates her intrusion towards his most treasured possession but hands it to her directly, - and assuming, of course, that it is better than her own (if she already had one that is), she is very likely to allow him to mate in exchange for it. A male which will give up its prized anvil is a male which will not be stingy with feeding her while she sits on her nest and providing for her young, and so even if he may not be as good a provider overall as the male which performs well on the "shell-cracker test", he may well balance it out by sharing more of what food he does procure. In the mitten dating world, it pays greatly to share.

above: A bachelor male scaly-breasted mitten demonstrates his shell-opening abilities for a potential partner.

~~~

Once bonded, mittens are socially monogamous and may mate for life. Occasionally "married" units also occur in which two males, usually siblings, will cooperate to court a female and share a mate and bond as a trio; females seem not to mind two husbands a bit, for it means she will be even better cared for, and she would likely take many more were it not for the fact that unrelated males will not typically tolerate other males around their mates as some sibling pairs do. These threesomes often have especially high reproductive success, presumably due to the increased ability to guard their young and provide food. In such situations, all individuals will mate with one another, alternating between male and female roles to affirm their bonds.

Once a pair or a trio is established, then the birds can get down the real business of reproducing. In the Pangeacene, where so many birds have developed new manners of reproduction that are often wholly independent of either a hard shelled egg or active incubation, the mittens are a relatively rare exception. Along with certain seabirds and waterfowl, they are one of the only bird groups which still lay hard-shelled eggs and incubate them with their own body heat in nests. Water snuffles did so in burrows accessed below the water line, but mittens have simplified their needs to a simple depression on the ground, sometimes lined with grass or a bit of downy feathers and hidden in vegetation near water. Three to eight eggs are laid, usually four or five, which are incubated entirely by the female while the male(s) feed her, and hatch in about thirty days. The chicks are precocial and can run from birth but depend on their parents for protection. The parents provide them partially-chewed food, but they are also fully able to catch their own even at just hours old, usually insects. The young eventually disperse between six month and a year of age, and can breed by the age of two years, though most males will not snag a partner for another year or two, when they are more expert at finding food. Individuals typically live ten to fifteen years, though twenty is not impossible. The main threat to mittens is predation, to which their only real defense is to flee. On land they are quick sprinters but will, whenever possible, run towards water when pursued, diving underwater and swimming to escape land-based predators.

The behavior of mittens in carrying around their favorite shell-cracking stones has led additionally to mittens occasionally moving their eggs from one site to another if they feel that the first nest has become unsafe. Taking their eggs tenderly in their tentacles, they may ferry them between different nests several times over the course of incubation in an effort to prevent their scent from becoming too strong and attracting predators to any given location.