Tonguetwister

Newly-forming forests across Serinaustra in the early hothouse provide new habitat. Formed mainly by the "dancing trees" which form interlocking thickets that sway in the wind, this environment provides welcome cover to wildlife such as the tiny tonguetwister, a skewer far less fierce than most. 

The tonguetwister is a skewer that, in the newfound abundance of the hothouse age, has forgone most of its fearsome behavior, reverting back into a harmless, swallow-like creature that eats small insects. They have found little need to continue hunting avian prey with this boom of easier food, for the hothouse climate supports immense populations of arthropods, and they are usually far less dangerous to subdue. They are fast and nimble flyers, and about 60% of their diet is now made up of flying insects. But while individually easy to catch, bugs are small, and so the tonguetwister has to catch a lot of them. To do so, it has adapted both behaviorally and physically to make this an easier task. 

The tonguetwister supplements its diet heavily with nectar, its ancestors reverting to their pollinating butterbird roots as soon as the climate became less extreme. The return of forests to Serina, mostly in the south where thorngrazers don't exist to mow them down, has brought with it a new surge of plant evolution, and a radiation of flowering trees descended from clovers and countless smaller flowers with distant sunflower ancestry now exist. The high-energy sugary drink found in all of their blossoms provides the calories needed to spend the rest of its time chasing down insects that provide vital protein, and the tonguetwister has evolved a highly specialized, branching tongue that is suited very well to lap up nectar. The tongue is long and highly flexible, stretching up to 1/3 the length of the body, and has long papillae that are each lined with small hairs that serve to hold onto droplets of liquid. This lets the tonguetwister easily empty deep forest flowers of all of their nectar, its tongue picking up liquid like a paintbrush, while its facial feathers collect pollen and so fertilize the plant in the process. But this tongue, when free of nectar and instead wet with sticky saliva, becomes a net that can be swept through the air as the bird flies through thick clouds of gnats and other insects as they swarm over the soggy landscape, collecting them in great numbers. For this fascinating adaptation, the tonguetwister belongs to a small group of birds just recently diverged, which are known as linialinguids (net-tongues.) All of them have multipurpose tongues that can both suck sugar and net gnats, and the tongue may even be put to other uses; the stickiness of it can even pull mites and lice out of the plumage during preening, like a lint roller pulling pet hair off clothing, and so turning parasites into protein.  

Unlike some other skewers diverging in the early hothouse such as the flickbills, linialinguids lack parental care, and their young have diets unmodified from earlier species. They are long-lived as larvae, feeding on plant sap below ground, and emerge synchronously during the night after several years of time spent unseen in the soil. Once fledged, they are fairly short-lived, living as little as two years, and females only being mature enough to breed for nine to twelve months, with males maturing much sooner and only reaching about half the female's size.