Tentacle Birds of the Early Ultimocene

Rhyncheirids

Soft-billed Birds of the Early Ultimocene

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The rhyncheirids - the distant descendants of the water snuffle, one of the few surviving bird groups at the end of the Thermocene - now occur across Serina in many highly derived forms. Bringing together some of the most primitive and most derived traits, they are enigmatic and unusual; the soft tissue along their nares, once supporting their nostrils, evolved bit by bit into a sensitive sheath that covered the bill of their earliest ancestors to provide a sensitive sleeve of nerves to find burrowing invertebrate prey by touch under cover of darkness. From there, small bumps on the skin grew longer, becoming short fleshy feelers; as the sheath of skin over the bill became more developed, these feelers gained some independent mobility, and over tens of millions of years a matrix of new muscles developed to power increasingly complex movement of the beak tissue until, today, all members of the clade are allied by a highly sensitive set of appendages used like fingers to manipulate their environment/. Their primary common name is slightly misleading; the bill of these birds is in fact still hard and sharp, only now hidden beneath this covering of soft tissue. Birds of this clade may also be referred to informally as squidbirds or tentacle-faced birds.

Despite their aberrant facial anatomy, softbilled birds are very primitive in other respects - namely, their reproduction. The last large birds to lay eggs with hard, calcified shells that require brooding, they have in this respect evolved behavioral complexity, rather than physiological changes, to improve their reproductive success.

There are two important groups of softbilled birds alive in the early Ultimocene; they are descended from two earlier ancestors, the gloves , which evolved into the modern grapplers, and the mittens, whose modern descendants are a more varied clade known as teuthaves. Teuthaves are primarily herbivorous-leaning and further divided into the small, climbing boras and long-legged terrestrial terries, while grapplers are less varied and all obligate carnivores.

Together, these two aberrant branches of the bird family tree comprise some of the last megafaunal birds on Serina. In the age of tribbetheres, these birds now stand almost alone among them - the only flightless, ground-dwelling large avians that are not in decline living among tribbethere competitors. Though some large placental birds, such as spearrunners, have persisted, their reigns are coming to a close. The softbilled birds, however, are still in their heyday, having never been more ecologically and morphologically diverse than they are right now.

Grapplers

Grapplers are predatory rhyncheirids with highly specialized facial appendages that have evolved internal, jointed bone rods to support them, giving these birds five truly novel grasping appendages which radiate from the mouth, resembling a hand, which grab prey and bring it into the sharp, hooked beak hidden beneath to be rendered. The ancestors of grapplers evolved their stronger, more hand-like appendages in order to burrow; they use these clawed facial fingers to dig out dens to rest and raise their young. Gloves largely got around molodont egg predation that threatened smaller tree birds in the most simple way; they construct a deep, fortress-like nest inaccessible to nest predators. Here the mother reared her young entirely sealed from the outside world except for a tiny window where the male delivered her food.

Early grapplers were small, rarely larger than a raccoon; they lived in burrows in forests and ambushed prey that came past, dragging it underground like large spiders. Sealing their mates in holes, at that time, was effective. The trend as the Ultimocene goes on, however, was toward larger, more active lifestyles, and with these this sealed nesting chamber behavior broke down. Larger grapplers could effectively defend their nests from egg-eating predators without being enclosed; burrows provided only one entrance and no molodont would be foolish enough to come down into the waiting gape of toothed tentacles that the brooding mother spread out to fill the burrow's diameter when threatened.

Grapplers today have evolved several large predatory forms which hunt their prey actively; one among them is currently largest predator living on land anywhere on the world.

The Grapplepard

The grapplepard is a mid-sized grappler that can be found across Serinarcta's forests and savannahs; weighing around 180 lbs, it fills the niche of a large cat. Like all grapplers, it is a solitary predator that hunts by ambush, but it does not wait for its prey to stumble into its path; like a tiger, the grapplepard stalks its victims and creeps close before launching a rapid pursuit. Though bipedal and without forearms, as is the case for all rhyncheirid birds, the grapplepard's strong facial arms along with its powerful hind legs and flexible hips allow it to climb up sloped trees, from which it may descend to ambush its prey.

The Greater Grappler/Terror Glove

Previously discussed 5 million years previous, this largest of grapplers is the largest land predator on Serina today. A denizen of thickets, it rushes into the open to engulf prey in its deadly embrace, shredding struggling animals with the toothy projections lining their powerful facial arms. Males have adapted their burrow-building nesting behavior into a variation more like a giant bowerbird; this is discussed in their prior entry. Included here because the original drawing was hard to make out, and it remains an important species today.

Teuthaves

The descendants of the mitten, an intelligent tool-using semi-aquatic bird, the teuthaves are more ecologically varied than the grapplers as well as more intelligent. Their tentacles lack bony support, though have rows of cartilaginous discs to help provide structure, and so lack joints. They are more varied in number, from five to as few as one. Teuthaves are primarily omnivores, tending toward herbivory.

Ancestrally small and terrestrial, modern teuthaves belong to two clades; boras, which are still small but live in trees, using their tentacles as grasping hands to climb like primates, and terries, which are terrestrial but large and generally cursorial. Boras are more specious but found only in the tropical jungles, where they feed on seeds, flowers and fruit, plus small animals, and rarely descend to Earth. They have very flexible hind legs and some of the the largest tentacles of any rhyncheirid relative to their body sizes, which range from a few ounces to twenty pounds.

Boras

The most notable boras of this time period are those which have taken the reduction in size to the extreme, such as the pygmy rainbora - a mouse-sized species found only in the cloud forests of one tiny region in equatorial Serinarcta. Living in a landscape of miniaturized trees and plants just above the rainforest on the side of a mountain range, these social, incredibly nimble climbing birds are the sole pollinators and seed distributors of a rare descendant species of the chokeweed grass discussed long ago in Serina's earlier eras. Chokeweeds now live worldwide, mostly as invisible strands of fibers hidden in the vascular channels of trees. They germinate from seeds spread by birds, and the seedling burrows into the bark and enters the tree, never photosynthesizing on its own. Entirely hidden in this way the parasite is protected from its enemies, relying on the tree for food and minerals. It makes its rare appearance only to flower, unveiling a pendulous red stalk and flowers that are pollinated by birds, then followed by seeds which are also eaten by birds that then spread the seeds to new tree branches in their droppings. In the case of the chokeweed that has co-evolved in the cloud forest with the pygmy rainbora, these are some of the smallest seeds on Serina, and scarcely larger than grains of sand. Eating the berries, each only a few millimeters wide, the boras spread the parasite obliviously as they forage in other trees in their miniature microcosm.

Terries

Terries, though of fewer species than boras, are found across most of the world and fill a wide variety of grazer, browser and omnivore roles in their ecosystems. Lithe, nimble terries that live in herds and fulfill a role akin to antelope, pursued by packs of circuagodogs and other predators, are particularly abundant. The most successful of these groups belong to a clade related, but not directly descended from, the polymorph bird, which have reduced their facial appendages to all but one very dexterous tentacle, somewhat resembling an elephant's trunk, which is used to pluck vegetation.

To survive abundant land predators as well as molodont egg-eaters, terries evolved to carry their eggs to new nest sites often as well as to pick up their chicks to protect them when young. This has been taken to a new extreme in one species, though, which has ceased to brood the egg on the ground at all. Instead, having evolved an ever more secure grip on the egg between its tentacles and a warm fold of skin on the neck that first evolved in a closely related branch of the family tree which included the noot, the neckbeard has now evolved to incubate its single large eggs entirely in this pouch, protecting both the egg and the young chick from all threats. This adaptation not only is very beneficial to survive new enemies, but also a cooling climate; the future for this clade looks bright.

The Oddball

There remains today one teuthave species that doesn't fit into either the boras, nor the terries. Rather, it is a sister lineage to both, descended from the mitten. It is the only species that has remained tied strictly to the water, having become more aquatic again after the mitten/glove lineage began moving away from it toward life on land after the end of the Thermocene.

Known as the wormy mitten, it is a very weird bird indeed. About the size of a cat, it spends most of its life in the estuary wetlands of northern Serinaustra and only rarely comes to land. Its hind legs, with which it swims, are far-set back and so, when it does emerge, it must walk stock-upright like a man, balanced by its large tentacles, lest it fall on its face. In this species the topmost pair of tentacles have become grossly elongated, while the other two pairs have become reduced to antennae-like whiskers; though small, however, they are very important to find prey, being finely attuned to acoustic vibrations. The main pair of tentacles have become covered in hooked bristles, rougher on the underside, but present all over, and now secrete a thick mucus which forms long dangling, translucent strands in the water. With this, this very unusual bird fishes underwater for small arthopods, tiny fish and bird larvae, periodically drawing them up and feeding them through its mouth to clean off anything caught on them, that become entangled in the mucus or snared with a quick retraction of the tentacle and hooked on a barbed bristle. These tentacles are also important for communication; the bright markings of the feeding pair are used for visual communication through ritualistic wriggling movements, while the smaller pairs are used for closer facial touching.

Although it generally hunts near the surface, the wormy mitten is capable of diving, both to find prey in deeper waters, sometimes running its tentacles over the riverbed to try and sift out small bottom-dwelling animals, or to quickly retreat from predators. Sometimes they may be found at sea, being tolerant of saltwater at adulthood thanks to salt glands that expel excess minerals out their nostrils, though rarely far from a freshwater inlet as their chicks require fresh water to drink before these glands are functional.

The wormy mitten is lifetime monogamous, but outside of bi-yearly courtship and rearing of young, pairs do not strongly associate with one another, being solitary while foraging. Nesting occurs in burrows dug out along the shore, similar to other mittens, and they lay just one or two eggs incubated by the mother while she is in turn fed by the male. The young are semi-precocial, able to walk and swim soon after hatching, but require post-natal parental care for a long period. Highly intelligent, they must learn a variety of instilled behaviors that vary across their range; different mittens specialize on distinct effective hunting strategies, learn what is and is not good to eat, and also learn the best locations in their ranges from their parents. The chicks often don’t even know what to make of the ridiculously floppy meat ropes attached to their face, never mind that they can hunt with them, for the first few weeks of their lives.

a male wormy mitten returns to his family after a successful foraging trip; his mate and chicks are very eager to see him again!