Emerald Sapsipper

A diminutive scrabblegrabber from the high jungle treetops, emerald sapsippers have evolved to utilize a food source out of reach for most animals, and in turn make it accessible to other species during the long polar winter.

Only weighing about 12 ounces, it is a very small scrounger, though not the littlest. It scurries with remarkable speed up and down the trunks of trees, holding tight with its sharp toe claws, each up to 30% the total length of its body, and so having a lot of leverage to pull and carry its weight. It is very fast-moving and energetic, and frequently skips between trees as far as fifteen feet apart, dropping from a higher trunk to a lower one, in a constant search for foods high enough in calories to sustain its constant activity. It often chisels grubs from below the bark like larger relatives, listening close and tapping to listen for echos to determine where prey is hiding. It then punctures a hole the wood with a quick picking motion to catch its prey on its long lower tentacle, which is spear-like, with a cartilage rod providing support. Yet bugs alone don't provide the instant energy it needs - for that, it seeks out sweeter substances. Flowers are an easy go-to throughout the year, but they are a resource for which competition can become extreme, and one often dominated by flying animals that guard them. Another alternative, similarly rich in sugars, can be found even more abundantly however - if you know where to look.

The sapsipper drinks tree sap, particularly during the winter when trees are dormant and convert stored starches in their tissues into free sugars, making their sap sweeter. To access it, it drills pinholes all through the thinner upper branches with its spiked tentacle, then laps the flowing liquid up with a narrow but very long tongue which can be half as long as its body. In winter the sap is nutritionally equivalent to flower nectar, but virtually limitless, and many other animals trail the sipper to drink from its bore holes before they dry up, especially animals which lack the ability to dig into bark on their own. In this way, the sapsippers directly benefit many other small forest animals by providing a new food source otherwise unattainable. 

With wide eyes with specialized rods and cones which shrink and grow with the seasons to improve its night vision and color vision as the forest cycles from summer to winter, sapsippers - like other scrabblegrabbers -  have excellent visual acuity. They avoid enemies by keeping watch at all times with eyes on the side of their heads, able to see both ahead and behind in a nearly 360 degree range, and can furthermore rotate their eyes in their sockets forward and back. This gives them the capacity for both binocular vision to land long jumps, and almost literal eyes in the back of their heads to detect predators creeping up. They often drop down from one tree to another if pursued by a climbing hunter like the treetiger, leaving hunters empty-handed. It slips behind and below branches if a flying predator is detected, however, and remains motionless for as long as twenty minutes when frightened, vanishing into the background. It hides its bright yellow crest on its nape by lowering it, and presses its red and violet head feathers against the bark so that its cryptic black-and-olive-green plumage hides it against the mossy surface until the threat has cleared.

As with all scrabblegrabbers, sapsippers are cavity nesters. They breed in the spring in pairs, rearing up to seven chicks in a single brood which remain with their parents for a year. The chicks lack the distinguishing colors of adults, being entirely olive green which provides good camouflage as they are far less agile and able to flee enemies when they first leave the nest. The green feather coloration of this and some other scrabblegrabbers has a similar origin to that of sealumps and snifflers as a copper based pigment, albeit one slightly different from their distant relatives. It is synthesized from copper in the insects they feed upon and is not a structural color, as the green is in sparrowgulls with more complex, less hair-like feathers. Red plumage in both the trunkos and in other scroungers has a similar metabolic origin and is the result of a related copper pigment with a dietary origin. Through these pathways, even birds with very structurally simplified feathers that can no longer support complex structural coloration can be dyed in brilliant hues.