The Aukvulture

The aukvulture is a descendant of the skydiver which has adapted to exploit the refuse of the sea stewards' society, skipping diving and hunting for its own food and instead staying around gravedigger boats and garbage dumps. This seraph is thus a strong flyer and can still swim, but isn't a very skilled diver any longer. Millions of years of scavenging has made its beak more robust and enlarged the tooth-like projections along it to resemble the teeth of a butcher's bone saw, well-suited to strip off leftover meat scraps from large bones.

Though scavenging is an easier lifestyle than hunting, it is a crowded one in the late Ocean age, with many animals having the same idea. Some scavengers are aggressive, and dominate refuse through hostility. Others are small and fast, darting in between bigger rivals and taking their piece. Aukvultures are neither. They are simply large enough, with up to a twenty foot wingspan, that they can take what they want without need for overt aggression from most other flying scavenger birds as they are one of the only seraphs that feeds on meat and even the biggest flying sparrowgulls, sea ravens, do not reach anywhere near their size as they cannot launch off the ground with their wings.

Aukvultures are intelligent for seraphs, an outlier with a very large brain to body ratio nearing average sparrowgull proportions. Their increased intelligence coincides with a shift from fishing to scavenging and living within close proximity to the oceanic sapient species. This is a more complex and changing setting, where simple instincts to dive and catch food are usurped by the need for a malleable, flexible repertoire of behaviors to manipulate people into offering scraps, know what is and is not safe to eat, and to generally learn and abide by many arbitrary customs so as to become a favorable animal to tolerate and not a disruptive pest. Aukvultures are thus very mild-mannered, patient, inquisitive, and able to learn patterns easily. While sea ravens are a belligerent pest and a thief of gravedigger food supplies (and attacking children is not unknown either), aukvultures stick around being inoffensive and quiet and learning how to exploit gravedigger's resources without any need to be aggressive about it. Just the the presence of aukvultures around boats discourages sea ravens by their large size alone, and so their presence is not only tolerated, but encouraged.

Wouldn't you play fetch with a giant friendly dragon if you could?

These seraphs still nest on rocky cliffs with a polygamous social structure, but the benefits carried by both sexes being large has reduced the differences between them, with males now being only slightly bigger, and adaptation to fit into sea steward society so well has made them largely non-aggressive. Female mate choice is now the rule, with males aggressive drives redirected away from fighting each other and instead toward proving his worth as a provider by gathering as much food as he can for a potential mate and driving off rival species, like sea ravens, that also nest on the same cliff sites. Though only the female broods her pupal offspring, the male protects her and his other partners (2-4 in the harem being typical) and feeds them all as they sit so that they don't have to leave their young, for they lack a fully-developed pouch and only exhibit a skin fold that can be laid over the nest like a blanket. Feeding up to four families at once can be a lot of work for the male, and it is very common for younger or smaller subordinate males to be allowed into the group, called a tribe, to help. These smaller males are often allowed to mate by the females when the dominant male is not around, and as long as he doesn't see it happen, all parties seem willing to turn a blind eye to this infidelity in exchange for help providing food and keeping away the sea ravens.

Sea ravens are indeed such a threat to the little dove-sized aukvulture chicks that though they are born with wing feathers and can fly shortly after hatching, they avoid leaving the nest at all for up to two weeks, instead bonding closely to their mother and other familiar adults in their tribe and learning to recognize them and avoid unrelated adults. During this time, all of the adults feed them. When they do begin to fly, they are escorted by the adults for more than six months until they are large enough to be safe from flying predators. During this time they are instructed by their elders on how to find food and interact positively with the sea stewards, as well as with other competitor animals. The young may begin to leave their caretakers around this time, though are not driven away aggressively and may stay much longer. Juveniles stay together as a flock for another two or three years after leaving the natal tribe until they are fully mature and then split off to find mates and form their own tribes.

Orphaned aukvultures are rare, as adults are very likely to adopt wayward chicks, but occasionally young can be isolated from the breeding colonies and grow up alone. Like other seraphs, they are instinctively primed with enough skill to take care of themselves and find food from fledging, but without the additional learning period with their parents in their first few months these individuals don't learn any manners. If they later come across the gravediggers on their boats, they are often abnormally aggressive and extremely rude, taking whatever food they come across and having no concept of social graces. Such problem individuals are viewed with extraordinary disdain by others of their kind, as their bad actions have a negative affect on how their whole species may be treated, and so such bad apples are often mobbed and driven away forcefully. They are forced to live their lives at the periphery of the tribes in a sort of feral existence and even rejected as mates. Though aukvultures can survive without the upbringing of a tribe, they revert to more savage, instinctive behavior patterns and so never reach their full potential.