Diversity of the Flickbills

A new group of birds radiates across the hothouse world by 280 million years PE. Descended from carnovorous skewers, flickbills now use their specialized, jointed beaks to explore a wide range of food sources. In addition to the fearsome butcherbeak already seen, three other lineages are now distinctly identifiable.

Scarreots

The species of skewers seen so far in the hothouse have all remained mostly carnivorous. Indeed, the vicious spiked beak of the clade, from which they are named, evolved as a deadly offensive weapon that let their pollinating ancestors become deadly predators.  But some middle hothouse skewers have evolved down different lines again, using this structure to process different types of food. The flexing, jointed mandible is as close to a new, proper limb as any contemporary bird has evolved (trunko limbs have no bones) - and its uses are varied.  Some flickbills learned to use it to help climb, as a hook to hold branches, and this occasionally brought them into contact with novel food sources like fruit and seed. The beak, by folding backward against itself, could easily break open these things into a soft pulp that could be licked up by the tongue, and some became omnivorous in this way. These birds are now known as scarreots, a group of relatively large skewers that hunt rarely and now mostly consume plant foods. Fruits are the bulk of the diet of most of the several dozen scarreot species which have emerged in the last couple of million years across the forest regions of the world, and the birds are well-adapted to find them, with zygodactyl feet excellent at clinging to branches and their flexible jointed beaks able to reach out to grab clusters of berries at the end of thin twigs too weak to support their weight. The end of the scarreot's bill is a sharp hook, useful to help pull their own weight up the trunks of trees and to scoop the flesh from larger fruits. The main mechanism in the beak used to feed, though, is the nutcracker-like joint that presses the distal tip of the mandible backward against the base of the beak, pulverizing food. This innovation has allowed scarreots to become the widest-ranging flickbill clade, and to live across the world on both continents. 

In the seedsplitting scarreot, a species that lives in the forests of northern Serinaustra, this mandible is especially robust and is able to crack the shells of large tree nuts as wide across as 3 inches. This scarreot species feeds almost completely on the seeds of plants that grow in these habitats, such as those of large, palm-like starsedges, a plant group that arose five million years before as a small streamside herb but now includes species that can surpass 120 feet in height - so high that it becomes more difficult for the flightless murds to access their ripening seeds before flying birds, like the scarreot, get them first. These nuts are usually abundant, though colonies of these trees fruit at different times so that the scarreots, moving in pairs or small flocks, must always search a wide range to find them at the right times. No other flying bird has the beak strength to eat these seeds, which are high in fat and nutrients, and competition is minimal. This allows the seedsplitting scarreot to feed during the day, rather than at night like other skewers. It also enables it to breed throughout the year and, unusually among skewers, to raise its young on a nearly vegetarian diet in which the only meat the larva is fed is often in the form of incidental worms and bugs that may occasionally infest the nuts; the adult may sometimes scavenge carcasses or consume the helpless nestlings of other birds, however, though this behavior is opportunistic in origin and the species is not typically predatory toward animals that are not otherwise incapacitated. 

The larva of the scarreot is true to typical butterbird form, born blind and featherless with clawed forelegs and raised in a tree hollow by both parents which provide partially masticated food and protection from enemies, but do not brood the young. The larva hatches with a well-developed beak, which it uses to cut and chew crushed seed pulp provided by the adult. Multiple eggs are laid but only a single chick is usually fledged from each nest, with the largest usually eating its weaker siblings in the first week of hatching - this is perhaps a vestigial habit from more predatory ancestral forms, and the additional protein may be beneficial to the surviving chick's development. It pupates at 6 weeks of age and emerges fully-feathered in another four weeks, at which time it is about the size of a dove, around 5 ounces. It remains near its parents even after fledging, however, imprinting on them, and continues to receive food until it is almost five months old. This greatly increases its initial survival, as during this time it is fed the large seeds of the starsedges that it could not yet break on its own and so can amass substantial fat stores that will fuel dispersal flights later, sometimes carrying them thousands of miles. Once weaned, they become highly nomadic and forage in flocks of similarly-aged peers for fruits, insects, and smaller nuts until full size - a weight of about two pounds and a wingspan of three feet - is attained around two and a half years of age. Scarreots take some time to reach sexual maturity, often five to six years, but have long adult lifespans that may stretch more than 60 years, as their bite force is formidable and they have few predators as a result. Once mature, they form pairs and settle down near nest sites; the adults' wings are shorter relative to their size than the juveniles, and less suited for long distance flight. 

Daggerbills

Daggerbills are a group of flickbills that haven't changed their basic body shape, their flesh diets, or their gruesome feeding habits very much since their ice age ancestor. But like their more varied relatives, they too have increased in size. While far smaller than the butcherbeak of the grasslands - the biggest of them all - daggerbills, some now as large as crows, have left behind a diet of meager insect prey. They are now formidable predators of small forest-dwelling animals like sparrowgulls and molodonts, and some can even subdue prey nearly as large as themselves. Hunting under cover of darkness these nocturnal birds flap quietly from tree to tree within the spire forests of Serinarcta, hopping along the branches and clinging to the trunks as they search for food. They kill by stabbing their upper mandible rapidly down into the abdomen of hapless smaller animals and driving it out the other side, using their mobile hooked tongues to scrape and pull the innards out of the body and leaving behind the pelt and bones - little more than an emptied husk. In the case of the especially sinister-looking vampire daggerbill of the northernmost spire forests, hidden in darkness for months each winter, the prey is held even more firmly by a pair of fang-like projections of the base of the beak. Like a fork, these "teeth" let the vampire restrain especially large prey animals and prevent injury to the dagger as they struggle in their death throes. Its tongue is especially long and retractable, able to extend ten inches outside the body - long enough to enter through even large prey's body orifices and extract its organs and inner tissues like a meat hook.

Though their behavior is more similar to the butcherbeak,  daggerbills are closest related to scarreots and represent a sister group. Their nesting behavior is nearly identical, except for the food they provide their nest-bound young being exclusively animal in origin. Young daggerbills can also be cannibalistic, though not obligately; the smallest and weakest young may be killed by older siblings if food is not adequate, but in abundance as many as six or seven chicks may be fledged from a single nest. Unlike scarreots, they don't receive parental attention after leaving the nest, which is abandoned when they pupate so that the chicks never know their own parents. As is most typical for skewers, they are fierce and independent hunters from the moment they can fly.

Taptrackers

Taptrackers are the fourth major branch of flickbills, being closer related to scarreots and daggerbills than to butcherbeaks, but not as close as those first two are to one another, having split off a few million years earlier. They are small to medium-sized, usually diurnal, insect-eating birds that use their beaks to dig wood-boring insect larvae out of dead trees. Their name comes from their habit of tapping the bark and listening to the resulting echos which give away the location of hollowed-out patches in the trunk where prey may be hiding; when such a pocket of air is discovered, the taptracker punctures through the bark and seeks to spear the insect out. It tongue is long and flexible, lined with backwards-facing hooks that can help to wrangle it into reach of the beak and to pry the meat off once it is skewered.

The teetering taptracker, so called for its dramatic side to side swaying movements as it sweeps along the trunks of trees tapping for echos, is native to northern Serinarcta, and makes its home in lightly wooded swamps of the upperglades, a wooded swamp that has begun to diverge from the northern soglands as trees become more abundant. Here it forages in the scattered stands of water-tolerant dancing trees and other non-cementree flora that has begun to colonize this region as a result of the ecological shifts brought by the spread of gantuans and their relatives, which have different feeding patterns than thorngrazers. Its larva differ from those of related species for being relatively independent and leaving the nest site before pupation, so that they only rely on parental care for a short time. Eggs are laid in a tree hole atop a larder of stored food, similarly to butcherbeaks, and the young eat this larder without additional parental attention. When it is depleted, they leave the nest and hunt grubs and other insects on their own within tunnels that they claw out within the soft, rotten wood of their nest tree. Pupation occurs around 2 months later in a secure chamber as deep in the tree as the bird can manage, and the chick digs itself it out with its beak and wing claws once it emerges, now able to fly and take care of itself. Teetering taptrackers are highly dependant on very old, decomposing trees to reproduce, as only they are soft enough for the larvae to burrow through, and though adults are adaptable and will forage in a variety of habitats, only these rotting, damp trees in the swamp are used to breed.