The Crested Pocketfowl

The crested pocketfowl is a species of goose-like seraph closely related to the skydiver, but part of a sister group rather than a descendant.

This species of seraph weighs 10 -14 lbs with a six to seven foot wingspan (male, female is smaller), and forages in flocks along coastal wetlands for grass, algae, seeds, insects and small fishes. Though it can graze on land, it prefers to feed in shallow water and is an excellent swimmer with lobed front toes and large webbed hind feet - it is not well-adapted to dive, however, and mainly feeds within reach of the surface. Like its relative it has lost the hind wings of its ancestors and replaced its plumage with scale-like skutes, making it a faster swimmer, but in its case the small digit that the wing feathers attached to is now also lost.

Pocketfowl get their name from their most distinctive trait. They have evolved an abdominal pouch to brood their pupating offspring, and are so able to move around and feed away from the nest site while still keeping the developing young warm. This structure originated as a simple fold of skin used to cover the pupal cocoon in a nest, but is now a well-developed marsupium. Closing tight with a sphincter muscle, this pouch can now close to keep the cargo inside even in flight or while swimming. When the chicks emerge they are fully-flighted, miniature versions of the adult as in all seraphs, and they can feed themselves immediately after emerging from their egg-like cocoons. These chicks, though they do not absolutely need to, will often stay near the parent for up to eight weeks for protection from larger predators, and will be provided some food by their mothers during this time. Parental care is becoming stronger again in this lineage, after being ancestrally lost in archangels, though only the female has a pouch and the male's contribution is limited to predator defense and the sharing of some food resources with his offspring.

above: a male crested pocketfowl stands vigil over two smaller females, as a newly-emerged chick takes flight from its mother's brood-pouch, visible on her lower abdomen.

The male pocketfowl cannot devote his sole attention to any one female or her offspring, for he protects many mates in a harem system. To fulfill this role he has become significantly larger than the female, often more than double her weight so that he can fight and challenge opposing males, and to win their favor he has become much more decorated than any archangel before him with vibrant iridescent plumage and a large flattened casque on his beak that flushes red and yellow as he displays. Though pocketfowl regularly gather in flocks of hundreds for protection in numbers, within each aggregation males maintain a small territory around themselves in which they are constantly pushing wandering females back into and warning adjacent males to keep their distance. Males that don’t will be attacked violently, and equally matched males can sometimes fight for more than an hour, using their sharp beaks and a hardened bony knob on their front limbs to beat one another bloody. To spend too long fighting is risky though, because there are always other males waiting for a chance to steal unguarded females for their own groups. Thus fights are most often brief and display is much more utilized to demonstrate territorial boundaries. Males may seem to dominate females and control their movements via their larger size, but females do have a say in mate-selection. Being smaller, they are faster and more agile. Males that are the best protectors are the most attractive harem-keepers, and if a female sees another lost to a predator she is very likely to escape and seek out the protection of a better guardian. If she really wants to get away, no male can stop her.

Even after leaving their mother's care, juvenile pocketfowl will try to stay near to adult groups. Adult males cannot really recognize their own offspring and will assume any that come into their territory must be theirs, so they will continue to provide protection until the male juveniles are nearly adult and beginning to develop secondary sex characteristics and become potential rivals. Female pocketfowl, however, can and do recognize the offspring that belong to them and will not allow unrelated chicks to come too close to them or eat any food they have procured for their own babies to eat. After a certain point juveniles are too large to mingle with the grown-ups and form age-segregated flocks on the margins of the adult flock, usually at a year of age, and spend at least another year there until they are fully grown around age two. Young females will join the adults again as soon as they are mature enough to mate, while unpaired males remain on the fringes in tense, bickering bachelor flocks and wait for an opportunity to steal away some females and form their own harem. These outsider males inadvertently help protect the females and chicks simply by lingering on the flock’s edge where they are most likely to be targeted by predators. For this reason, females tend to outnumber males by as much as three to one.

Archangels as a whole originally evolved to give birth to the egg-like pupating cocoons of their offspring, rather than retain them until full maturity, in order to reduce the weight carried by the mother in pregnancy as she needed to be able to fly. But evolution doesn't necessarily operate by the most strictly efficient methods, merely whatever works. For pocketfowl, this has resulted in still carrying the young after all, but now doing so out of the body. As her broods are far smaller than those of early archangels, however - just 6 chicks on average - and they are very small when they leave the pouch, the weight is not a severe detriment to her ability to fly. Still, if threatened by fast-moving aerial predators such as skystrikes, mother pocketfowl will eject their offspring to save themselves; some smaller predators that would not be able to take down an adult will exploit this defense specifically to catch and eat the falling chicks.