The Fork-tailed Babbling Jay: Sapience Appears in the Rainshadow Desert

The Fork-tailed Babbling Jay

Life in the Rainshadow Desert

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above: three adult fork-tailed babbling jays perched on a desert tree, each holding in its bill a small stone cutting implement.

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The fork-tailed babbling jay (Loquax philosophus, meaning "talkative thinker") is a small magpie-like perching bird, with a handsome orange, black and white plumage and a long, deeply forked tail. It belongs to a widespread, very recently evolved family of corvid-like sparrowgulls which have spread across Serina from the dry interior desert northwards in the last one million years. Specifically, it is the most primitive member of a genus which includes two other birds, also known as babbling jays, on account of their general habits and wide repertoire of calls. It is a very young species, having been in existence for no more than 4,000 years. Slightly older are its two similar-looking close relatives, the larger Black-breasted babbling jay and the smaller white-winged babbling jay which live further north along the edges of tropical jungles where forests meet open plains. All three babbling jays are social and form monogamous pair bonds retained year to year. Males and females hold territories together throughout the breeding season and are identical in size and appearance.

All species also utilize an exceptionally wide array of vocalizations to communicate different things with each other and their offspring, such as food sources and different varieties of predators. They care for their young for a very long period for birds their size, up to a full year, during which time the parents don't usually breed again, and their chicks learn much from their parents, not only how to find food and avoid predators but also how to talk; understandings of different calls and how to produce them is not innate, but by the time they fledge, they will have picked up their parents' complex vocabulary and will in turn teach them to their own young.

The fork-tailed babbling jay shares all of the above attributes with its two close relatives, but lives in the harshest environment of all of them. It inhabits only a small belt of dry scrub and grassland south of the equator, known as the rainshadow desert, for it sits in the rain shadow of a large mountain range to the west that has prevented this particular region from becoming wetter and forested as the surrounding region has in the last twelve million years. Its ancestors moved here from the dry interior desert to the south, which has since receded in place of forest and is no longer adjacent to the dry habitat in which they now live.

Life in the rainshadow desert is harsh - food and water are comparably scarce and often hard to find for up to nine months a year, and the life-giving rains blow in only for a few fleeting weeks. As a result, the population of babbling jays which live here have developed a very complex social system in order to most successfully rear their offspring which is very similar to that which forms the foundation of wolf packs. In both the black-breasted babbling jay and white-winged babbling jay of milder climates, grown offspring often stay around to assist in rearing younger siblings. It was almost impossible, however, for a single pair of the jay population which gave rise to the fork-tailed babbling jays to raise young on their own in the dry, sparse climate in which they found themselves, making additional help obligatory. Food here, most of the time, is simply too widely spaced out and difficult to access. A pair of fork-tailed babbling jay can therefore reproduce only if assisted by at least two additional birds. This is most often accomplished when a new social unit is formed by either three siblings, the most dominant of which takes an unrelated mate, or by two siblings who each pair with a mate, but where the lower-ranking pair doesn't breed in exchange for the safety provided by having a flock to watch out for them. The social order between siblings that will as adults determine which pair is allowed to breed is determined at a young age through playful contests of strength, and aggressive conflict is very rare. As soon as the rains bring life to the dry lands in which they live, the dominant pair will commence to nest and hatch their offspring, which are incubated largely by the mother who is brought food in the form of insects and small animals by all three of the other partners.

When the young hatch all four forage to provide for the first brood of nestlings and then continue to feed them when they leave the nest. To find food, babbling jays are versatile foragers. They are mostly carnivorous, though will eat some seeds and fruit if it can be located. Their harsh, seasonally changing environment has required the development of especially good problem-solving skills versus their relatives in more stable environments and they have become extremely adaptable tool-makers and users. They find insects hidden in wood by stripping off the bark of trees and utilizing thorns or sharpened twigs to probe the holes made by wood-boring beetle larva in order to fish them out. Adults teach their young how to break the eggs of ground-dwelling birds by cooperatively hammering them with rocks which would be too large to handle singly, as well as how to kill dangerous stinging insects with weapons from a distance - using sharpened sticks or crushing them under stones, to render them safe for consumption. Far into the rainshadow desert there is little larger prey available, but toward the desert's borders where grassy plains and patchy thickets of trees are able to grow, herbivores such as molodonts and predators such as bludgebirds eke out a living. Here, the babbling jays learned to kill small herbivores with sharpened spears which are sometimes tipped with venom squeezed from the stingers of insects to provide a faster kill, and utilize sharp stone chips as axes or knives. Initially selecting the sharpest naturally-occurring stone chips they could find, some then learned to chip stones themselves, including flint, to produce the sharpest edges possible for butchering prey. They do this by holding other, harder stones in one foot, and hammering them against already thin flint chips to produce small, sharp cutting implements one to two inches long that can easily be carried around with them.

The process caught on culturally, and now most babbling jays know how to knap flint to create cutting tools, which they hold in their beaks and cherish as prized possessions. They also prey on other birds and desert-dwelling tribbetheres by chasing them into an ambush, or by imitating the distress calls of their offspring and then killing them as they come near to find the source of the sound. Where possible, they also routinely harass other animals to pirate their food, mimicking the alarm calls of other birds and shrieking them when they see one has something they want, so that the other bird takes panic and drops its prize or aggressively harassing larger predators while other group members quickly gather as much of the carcass as they can bring back to the group. They preserve all types of food by drying them - easy in the desert sun. Insects and whole small animals are skewered on thorns, while larger kills are butchered and the meat dehydrated in thin strips. Such larders, stocked in the rainy season, are then relied upon throughout leaner times. The jays teach their young all of their skills, both hunting and in food preservation - none of them are innate, and thus different populations utilize different methods of feeding. Some are skilled spearers but have no knives, others have specialized mostly to catch insects, and a few are truly generalist, able to make a tool suited to obtaining nearly any potential food source. The young begin mostly clueless as to how to make or use tools but become competent very quickly. The parents demonstrate to their young how to craft and utilize different tools, and the chicks mimic the adults actions and try to fish out insects or break open eggs from a very young age. Though their coordination is initially poor, they begin to develop these skills competently by four months of age. By six months, fledgelings begin proficiently hunting, and they are effectively mature - able to do everything their elders can - in only a year.

Purely going by its physical appearance, there would be no way you could determine that the little and seemingly plain fork-tailed babbling jay is such a big thinker. Its brain to body ratio is not dramatically larger relative to its body size than that of the other babbling jays or many other sparrowgulls (though it's notable that it is higher than any other living Earth bird, with a raven-sized brain in a jay's body), but it is especially efficient, making the absolute most of the available space while not making the brain so large that flying ability is hampered - a further continuation of the trend observed in ancestral passerine birds, which being constrained by the need to be light enough to fly differ from ground-based mammals in normally developing increasingly efficient, rather than simply larger, brains. In the fork-tailed babbling jay, this process of streamlining over hundreds of millions of years has allowed it a similar mental capacity to ourselves, with a brain weighing only 14 grams - literally one percent the weight of the human brain, which weighs about three pounds, or 1,400 grams. However, it must also be noted that the body of human being is also hundreds of times larger than that of a babbling jay.

The fork-tailed babbling jay is not only highly intelligent in regards to problem solving and crafting tools to find food, but it is also demonstrably self-aware. The babbling jays have not only a wide repertoire of distinct calls used to communicate resources and threats, but have developed a proper complex language in order to most effectively communicate complicated ideas between individuals quickly. The instruction of this begins when the young are just hours old. In the nest, every newborn chick is given a distinct name in the form of a distinct sequence of syllables which is not used except when providing food to the particular chick to whom it has been given, so that by the time it leaves the nest it recognizes this name and responds excitedly when it is called upon in anticipation of food. It will keep this name throughout life. All of the chicks also learn the names of their parents and helpers, as each one repeats its own name before that of the chick it is feeding so that the chicks, once fledged, can immediately be expected to be able to distinguish between its caretakers. All of this knowledge is taken in by the chick even before it can see, let alone communicate back, and by the time the young is three weeks old it can easily distinguish each adult by its voice, put the right name to each face, and most importantly respond when called.

Growing Up and Learning the Language

above: a seven week old fledgeling fork-tailed babbling jay, looking very scruffy and gangly compared to its sleek elders. Though it can fly by this age and its plumage will be filled in within another week, it will not fully develop its motor skills for several months and won't develop the brighter markings of its parents until one year of age.

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Only one brood is reared in a breeding group's first year, for the young require a very long period of teaching before they can ever be trusted to fend for themselves. They are encouraged to begin leaving the nest as soon as possible, before they can fly, so that their instruction can begin as soon as possible. The adults are firm with their young. They stop feeding them at the nest as soon as the chicks are physically capable of leaving it, instead luring them from a distance with mouthfuls of prey and beckoning them plaintively by calling their names so that eventually hunger outweighs apprehension and the chicks climb into the branches for their morsels. It is at that moment that at least a year of intensive education begins for the youngster.

One of the first changes in teaching which occurs once the young leave their nest is that the adults stop saying their own names to the young, so that the chicks firmly learn that their own names are distinct from those of their parents and do not need to follow them; the process of adjustment takes several days before the chicks thoroughly grasp the idea that their names are a static, unchanging concept which can be combined with other words and phrases to form sentences, but they soon understand it well enough, and at this age they also begin to mimic the vocalizations of the adults so that they can call and refer to individual adults. The very earliest sentence they learned in the nest was "adult's name, your name", which at the time meant nothing more to them than food was being delivered and by whom. At this time the name becomes a more abstract concept and not simply a dinner bell. The second word usually added to the name is a command, a whistling note that means "come to me." At first it is uttered only in conjunction with a chicks' name and in anticipation of a meal, but within a few days the chick will also respond to this command alone and without an immediate bribe at hand. The adults can then reliably lead the chick to safer or more secure roosts, out of sight of potential predators, or anywhere else that it would be in their best interest to go. Being small prey animals, the babbling jays are highly vulnerable to predators and must learn very quickly how to avoid each type of them, as there is very little room for error. Different enunciation of the same call can be used to tell the chicks to move more quickly - to escape a ground-based predator that is approaching or slowly - if it needs to quietly slip into cover to avoid being spotted by a bird of prey. The "come" call soon expands to include other living beings than just the chicks, such as predators, and the tone can then be used not only to tell the chicks how to avoid the threat but also the speed and manner in which the threat itself is coming. Because the chicks are flightless for at least two weeks after leaving the nest, it is of priority they be taught to avoid predators even before they learn the words for food.

Fork-tailed babbling jays have a vocabulary of thousands of distinct words, and speak a complex language of bird song, the individual components of which are spoken too quickly to be understood by the human ear. Their languages originate from varied repertoires of predator alarm calls, like those used by prairie dogs, and still feature a distinct term for every predator their young will ever come across - not so much every species, but every "type". "Birds of prey that come from above" are one type, and are described as their own chirp which is further described by descriptive vocalizations that tell its location, size, speed of approach and whether or not it has taken notice of them. Other names for danger generally translate to similarly descriptive titles, such as "birds of prey that sneak through the trees", "climbers from the ground", such as a molodont or a bumblebadger, and "running land animal", such as a circuagodont. Different populations utilize different words and some are very specific in their names for each animal in the environment, equivalent to referring to different words for a hawk and an owl, which though similar hunt differently, whereas others rely on very general words that would broadly be equivalent to "cat", "raptor", or "snake." No matter what exact words the young are taught, however, they quickly learn to identify and respond accordingly to different threats. By five weeks of age, when the chicks first begin to flutter from one tree to another, they are competent in understanding phrases consisting of what the threat is, how it's behaving and how quickly it's moving, and how to avoid it (should you climb, or should you stand still, or should you fly away?) By this time, they also begin to ask questions to actively engage in the learning process. There are no specific phrases used to specify that a sentence is a question, rather, rather than a statement, but rather the difference is determined by the enunciation of the syllables in the word. Questions asked by the young at this stage are thus such things as "predator?", in reference to an unknown animal, and if the response is no, asking "what is?", to which the adults will then describe the creature. If it's not harmful, it might be a big one that can help them to find food by disturbing insects hidden in the grass while it walks, or it could be another bird that won't harm them but competes for food, and so is an enemy and to be chased out of the territory. In addition to teaching their own specific vocabulary describing the many types of threats that go bump in the night and will eat any unwary baby babblers, the adults also intermittently spout off the mimicked alarm calls of other birds and animals in the area in conjunction with their own words to teach the young to also pay attention to what the animals around them are saying, as they too can serve to warn them of danger as well and may notice something that the chicks have not.

Once the young are decently educated on what predators are and how to avoid them and at least partially multilingual in that they understand the alarm notes of many other animals in addition to their own species, they begin learning less immediately necessary words for other objects, such as trees and water and animals, including those they eat. They begin to follow the adults as they search for food, and around six to seven weeks of age have entered the toddler stage, where they vigorously question the names of, and information about, everything they come across in the environment. All of the adults in the family unit impart their knowledge into the young, playing off of personal experience and to a lesser extent knowledge handed down to them from their own elders. Finding food in the dry scrubland is difficult and requires intelligence; the adults do most of their foraging on the ground, where they poke underneath tussocks of grass with their long beaks or overturn sticks and rocks in search of beetles, crickets, or insect larvae. The demonstrate to their young how to craft and utilize tools, and the chicks mimic the adults actions and try to fish out insects or break open eggs from a very young age but their coordination is initially poor. They begin to develop these skills competently by four months of age. Like human children, they are reprimanded for poor behavior, such as fighting or straying away from supervision, while being rewarded for following rules. However, the young also have some leeway in manipulating their parents - in particular, if they are hungry but don't want to find their own food, they may put themselves into potentially dangerous situations - such as leaving the safety of cover and exposing themselves in the open - and thus attract all of the flocks' attention in order to bribe their parents into offering up a tasty meal to lure them back to safety, when such offerings would otherwise be discontinued in expectation of the young foraging for themselves. The plan can work well, but it can also backfire if the young is snatched by a predator during its defiant attempt to milk its parents for special treatment, and so the behavior tends to be self-limiting; surviving siblings will not quickly try it if they see one of their own taken in this manner. It is usually safer to work for your own food than risk being eaten in order to get a free meal from the adults.

As fork-tailed babble jay chicks become older, they also become more proficient flyers and can travel far across their territory in search of food with their parents. During the wet season they returned at night to the communal nest - a complicated domed structure of mud, grass, and twigs which provided protection from the elements, but they become nomadic as the dry season returns, roosting wherever they happen to be on a given night and not normally crafting any sort of shelter.

Juvenile fork-tailed babbling jays are very playful creatures, which hone adult skills through mock-fights among their siblings and playful games that allow practice of their climbing, flying, hunting and predator avoidance abilities. They make up their own games of hide and seek, keep-away, and king of the roost, and also adapt feathers, sticks, stones and clumps of grass into toys used in imaginative play. A tuft of grass tied together with two long feathers out the sides for wings becomes a mock cricket, which is tossed between the kids and pounced upon in the absence of a real one. As the chicks become more mature and if resources are sufficiently abundant, their parents may kidnap the fledgelings of other, smaller birds and provide them to their young as pets. If the chicks feed them and can successfully rear them to independence, it is especially good practice for when they themselves are expected to take up a parental role in the family unit - and if they fail, the chicks can be eaten like any other prey. Just as humans find baby animals with large eyes and small features like their own babies appealing, and often transfer maternal instincts onto them, babbling jays - even very young ones - are smitten with fledgelings, especially those with wide yellow gape flanges like their own nestlings and are instinctively compelled to feed them and nurture them. So strong are these instincts that babbling jays will adopt orphans of both their own and related species almost as a matter of course, and if they are unsuccessful in raising young of their own may even orchestrate a kidnapping of a neighboring group's chick. Though many other birds are easily raised on the same diet as their own young, and other species of babbling jays are even able to learn and understand some words, they are unable to truly learn the language which is so vital for communication between members of the group and therefore occupy a niche in the group between child and pet. As soon as they are grown, adults often grow tired of these incompetent fellows which cannot contribute as expected to the group and drive them off.

The attitude exhibited by the fork-tailed babbling jay towards hunting other birds varies. Generally there is no taboo against eating eggs or the precocial chicks of ground-dwelling fowl, but because they are so instinctively inclined to nurture babies, there is a nearly universal revulsion to the killing of altricial nest-bound chicks and fledgelings and so this is done only as a last resort if other food is not available. There is no similar cultural aversion to hunting other birds once they are adults and have lost their endearing gape markings and awkward uncoordinated motor patterns, however.

By the beginning of their second year, young babbling jays considered adults. They are capable of finding various types of food on their own, without adult assistance, and have learned to make their own tools when necessary. They have mastered their family's language, the names of all local predators, and the ways to deal with each one. They are not yet sexually mature, but are physically and mentally fully developed. However, they will continue to expand their vocabularies throughout life. Unlike most birds, they retain the ability to learn entirely new languages easily throughout adulthood. The behavior patterns utilized in learning to speak are identical to those of other songbirds as they are learning to sing, and so technically the entirety of babble-jay language is an extremely specialized song, which is modified and expanded throughout life rather than only in childhood as in other birds. This ability to readily learn not only new components of their native tongue but also other languages with completely different rules late into life is important for the babble jay as it matures, because between one and three years of age, depending on the size of their original family, offspring begin to disperse, often integrating into other family groups which may speak entirely differently.