Squidbirds: Boras, Terries, and the Squork

The Squork

Softbill birds, also known as Rhyncheirids (beak-hands), are the many and varied descendants of ancient water snuffles, which prosper as we head into the Ultimocene. They are allied by a muscular fleshy snout tipped with a varying number of mobile tentacles, their beaks entirely hidden from view when their jaws are shut, but beyond this common tie they have evolved into many widely distinct groups. Some, such as manatweets, still specialize to life as buoyant aquatic herbivores while others, such as gloves, become increasingly predatory.

It is the mitten descendants, however, known as the Teuthaves (squid-birds), that are currently the most successful and have given rise to two distinct groups at the start of the Ultimocene after the extinction of the bludgebirds, plus one outlying basal species. The first is a group of arboreal climbers, the other a family of cursorial terrestrial species. Both groups have become largely omnivorous and some members of both almost vegetarian, contrasting their strictly carnivorous ancestor. They are notable among birds for being able to chew their food, a process that in their case occurs thanks to cranial kinesis, or a jointed skull, that gives them the ability to grind their upper jaws back and forth against the lower. Cheeks have simultaneously developed from the fleshy beak covering so that food is retained in the mouth whilst being processed. These collective adaptations allow them to grind their food before swallowing it, much like the extinct large herbivore vivas of eons past. These innovations have negated the need for a gizzard, and potentially put them on par competitively with the tribbetheres at efficiently consuming plant foods.

It is on the northern landmass that the most derived tree-dwellers and terrestrial grazers have established themselves. On Serinaustra mitten-descendants are less well-represented, though the southern continent is home to a single basal member of the terrestrial clade known as the squork, or southern squid stork. A large crane-shaped bird common across much of the continent from the northern coasts to the southern plains, colored in a plain but pleasant white and tan color pattern in its thick fuzzy plumage, they diverged before terries proper, and are the closest living relatives of bludgebirds. Squorks fall morphologically somewhere between them and their more herbivorous relatives on Serinarcta, and are generalist omnivores which eat a wide variety of plant and animal foods. With very long legs and completely unwebbed toes, they are well-suited to running over land, even more so than the bludgebirds, yet like the ancestral mitten they still appear most comfortable foraging near water, in rivers, along sea coasts and in marshes and will take to water to flee predators. Standing six feet tall, they are are both larger and quite differently proportioned than any earlier rhyncheirid species and have adopted a more horizontal posture typical of more primitive birds, which provides a more stable center of balance. To further help keep their balance while running with a total absence of wings, their tails have elongated much as they did in the ancient serilopes.

above: a pair of squorks with a young chick forage for edible flotsam along the sea coast.

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Squorks are very similar in their habits to cranes. Most of their food is found near water and includes shellfish, insects, small tribbets, seeds, tubers, fruit and a small percentage of green foliage - nearly anything that they can fit into their mouths. They forage almost completely at ground level, often in water from a few inches to a few feet in depth, and use their tentacles to feel around for hidden worms and molluscs. Occasionally they may be found in upland environments, where they pick through tussocks of grass in search of seeds and insects. At rest, the tentacles along their beaks purse tightly, forming a long pseudo-beak, but when opened in fact reveal a shorter, broader bill suited to grinding food. The three tentacles attached to the lower jaw have fused into one central appendage in the squorks and their close relatives. In this species, the outer tentacles remain as small nubs on either side of the main structure; in other species, they are absent entirely. The inner surface of the remaining tentacles is lined with small keratin spikes that give the animal a firm grip on slippery prey.

Like cranes, squorks spend half of the year in large social groups, ranging from a few pairs to a hundred individuals or more, and the other half establishing a territory, nesting, and raising their young in isolated pairs. During the non-breeding season, flocks may move away from wetlands and winter in upland habitats, but nesting always occurs in or close by marshes. They are monogamous and the sexes identical; both the male and female incubate between one and two eggs in a nest which is exceedingly simple, typically consisting of nothing more than a smashed-down patch of grass in a hidden thicket, sometimes lined with a few twigs. The reasons for both their small clutch size and their insignificant nests are that squorks will often move their eggs several times over the course of incubation if they are at all inclined to feel they may be targeted by predators; a single bird can only cradle a single egg at a time, meaning that no more than two eggs can be reared at a time, and the frequent change of scenery makes taking the time to construct a large and complicated nest not worth the investment. The ability of squorks as well as other rhyncheirids to pick up and move their unborn offspring to new, safer sites if threatened substantially reduces the likelihood of their eggs being destroyed before hatching and thus improves their reproductive success over that of less ingenious bird species in a similar situation. This is surely another factor which is likely responsible for the great success of this group over other egg-laying birds at maintaining megafaunal niches since the evolution of egg-eating molodonts and other tribbetheres and placental bird predators.

When the young chicks hatch, they are very well-developed with long legs and bright eyes; they are more precocial than earlier softbill birds and can run within a few days of hatching. The parents initially hand-feed their young but within a few weeks the chicks simply follow their parents to food and forage for themselves. Though the chicks can run very early on in life, the parents will snatch them up at the slightest hint of danger and carry them securely until they are sure the threat is passed; indeed, some very proactive parents may not let their young touch the ground much at all for the first few weeks of their lives, with the male and female alternating as to who carries the kids while the other forages. The behavior is quite comical, particularly in cases of twins, where the parent struggles to keep hold of two struggling youngsters, one on either side of its snout, until the babies eventually give up, accept their circumstance, and drift off to sleep with their heads laid over the adult's snout. As the chicks rapidly grow, however, reaching adult size in a single year, they very quickly outgrow the ability of their parents to carry them and transition completely to walking beside them.

On the cold southern steppe, squorks that nest during the brief polar summer form migratory bands that move south in the winter. In milder climates, the species is much more sedentary, limited to local movements between the marshes where they nest, rich in aquatic food sources, and the drier uplands where they often spend the rest of the year, taking advantage of late-season food resources such as grass seeds and crickets that don't mature until the end of the summer.