Two Brainy Birds: The Bludgebird and the Babbling Jay

A Tale of Two Brainy Birds

Just to the south of the equatorial jungles but north of the interior desert, where the forests grow sparse, grasses begin to dominate, and the climate becomes dry for all but a few months of the year, there lurks a strange, highly intelligent avian predator.

It is well-suited to coursing its prey over these hot plains, its legs long and protected by thick scales while much of its body has become devoid of plumage to facilitate heat dispersal. This is hardly the strangest adaptation it sports, however - that would surely be the four highly developed tentacle-like appendages that surround its sharply hooked beak, which immediately identifies this creature as a mitten descendant known as the bludgebird.

Descended from a population of opportunistic mittens which moved entirely away from riverine environments and to a diet of terrestrial prey, it has become longer-legged and more sparsely feathered than its ancestor, but has lost none of its ingenuity. Four of its facial appendages have become more dexterous and longer, while one pair has become vestigial. It works in pairs or sometimes larger groups, launching coordinated attacks on molodonts and other small herbivores. It has retained the ability to utilize tools to obtain food, broadening its arsenal along with its diet to include not only stone anvils but clubs made from broken-off branches, which it uses to bludgeon its prey. Pairs work cooperatively to catch molodonts and other small herbivores, one serving as the beater, to drive them out of cover towards their mate, and the other as the basher, who heads them off them as they flee. For situations where a club may be inadequate such as to disable a larger and more dangerous herbivore, a spear may be produced, which can be thrown from a distance. The bludgebird can then trail its wounded prey at leisure, utilizing great endurance, until it dies of it injuries. Standing five feet tall, they are not exceptionally large, but their use of weapons means that they have few regular predators and are viewed with worry by even the largest herbivores on these grasslands.

above: the riverine mitten of the middle Pangeacene (left) and the plains-dwelling bludgebird of the late Pangeacene (right). Between them, a transitional form which lived roughly six million years ago, feeding as a generalist hunter of both swamp and grassland and utilizing a variety of tools to find a variety of food sources.

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The bludgebird is clearly highly intelligent, perhaps even one of the smartest birds ever to exist on Serina, but it is not sapient - at least, it is not beyond the level of the crows or the great apes. At the end of the day, the bludgebird is still an animal that lives to fill its stomach, mate, and pass on its genes. It creates tools, tailoring them for specific needs, and it learns these skills from its parents culturally, but it still doesn't have the mental capacity to think of abstract concepts, to produce art, or to dream of the future. It lacks a language, except for the basic set of social and alarm calls common to all social birds. It is so that while its upright posture, use of weapons, and relative nakedness may remind us our our own ancestry hunting on the plains of our own planet, the bludgebird is not the highly intelligent bird we are looking for. The bird in question does, however, coexist with the bludgebird, as one of the only animals that finds little in it to fear. Rather, by scavenging its kills, it in fact one of a very select few animals that finds benefit from sharing a territory with packs of savage, club-wielding squid-birds.

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A pair of bludgebirds, each holding a large branch in its tentacles, is hunting on the dry scrubs north of the interior desert. They have been walking for hours, and finally they have come across prey. A pair of circuagodonts, a mother and a juvenile, are sheltering from the heat in a thicket of brambles. Silently, the hunters look one another up and down, demonstrating with nothing more than movements of their eyes what the plan will be. The male sneaks around in a wide arc, walking low and using what little grass and scrub is available to hide itself, while the female approaches the thicket from the opposite side. The mother cicuagadont spots her and rises to its feet and positions herself ahead of her child, while the baby stares out of the thicket nervously, frozen in fear. The female bludgebird hesitates for several minutes, staring down its prey to unnerve it, but not making a further move until the male is in position, crouched beneath another bush a few meters behind the thicket. When he is ready, she rushes the thicket, sending both herbivores vaulting out the other side, grunting plaintive alarm barks. The mother bolts past the ambush, but as the less agile young one follows the male leaps out of hiding and cuts of its path, striking it forcefully across the back with its club. The calf is crippled and collapses, unable to move its hind leg. For a moment the male pauses, looking around and panting, giving the injured animal time to bleat out to its mother, who has made it some distance away but now stops and turns back toward her baby. She charges the predator, gnashing her jaws in a desperate rage, but as the female comes around the thicket to join him in swinging their clubs in her direction, the mother loses her nerve and turns to bound away, abandoning her calf. The young one, watching its parent turn away, cries out frantically, but it is no use. The squid-birds turn their attentions back to it at once, and put it out of its suffering.

The predators eat quickly, using their sharp talons to hold the carcass down while they rip flesh with their beaks. They eat both meat and bone, first going for the brain then working into the organs in the chest cavity and making a new opening to get at the muscles along the back. But their activities do not go unnoticed, and in just a few minutes, a small perching bird alights in the branches of the nearby trees, watching the action very intently. It is roughly the size of a magpie, with a long forked tail and a body colored mostly black and white with orange flanks and a mostly tan head turning to a black and white mask near the eyes. The beak is bright yellow, the legs long and orange-red. It has only three toes on each foot.

The birds sits for a few seconds, cocking its head left to right, while the predators tear flesh in large chunks from what was just a few moments ago a circuagadont but is now little more than an all-you-can-eat buffet. And then it leaves, flying away toward a distant patch of scrub. A minute later, however, a pair of the same type of birds return to the tree overlooking the carnage, followed by another, and then two more. In their beaks, they carry strange little stones with sharpened edges. Some of them hold additional larger rocks in their talons. The flock lines up in the tree... and then attacks.

All five birds begin swooping the predators, raking the tops of their heads with their beaks and talons and flinging the larger stones at their eyes. They scream as they pass, forcing the bludgebirds to duck and swerve to avoid a collision each time - and often missing one, but being struck squarely by the other. They circle around, picking up additional pebbles from the ground and flinging them at the carnivores, who now stop eating and circle around, trying to get a visual on their attackers. One picks up its club and swings blindly, but the targets are moving too quickly. One of the small birds snaps a large, sharp thorn from a tree and on a fly-by thrusts it into the female bludgebird's neck, causing her to moan and turn to pull it out with one of her long tentacles. This is sufficient to unnerve her, and she retreats for cover. The male follows, grabbing a leg of the carcass to go before making his own escape.

Two of the birds follow the predators and keep up the harassment, while the other three immediately settle on the carcass and, using the little sharpened stones in their beaks, set about cutting off thin slivers of the muscle meat. While the other members of their party keep the predators distracted, they work quickly to gather up as much as they can carry in their beaks and claws, and then they take off again back toward the distant trees. As soon as the three finish their theft, the two who continued to worry the hunters abandon their attack and follow their flock. Annoyed but not severely injured, the squid-birds look around for a few minutes before returning to finish the remainder of their kill.

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The predators have had their first, but unlikely to be their last, encounter with Serina's first sapient, a small-but-fierce, highly social sparrowgull known as the fork-tailed babbling jay. Unlike the bludgebird, this bird is not in any way extraordinary for its appearance. It is a small flying bird of about six ounces - larger than a blackbird but smaller than a crow, but resembling both in general shape. Its form is extremely conservative, almost unchanged even in 240 million years, and it closely resembles either a jay or a magpie. For all intents and purposes, it resembles something like what the bludgebird once was, a very long time ago - and yet under that seemingly mundane outward appearance, it is a vastly more complicated creature.