The Advent of Agriculture: The Farmerjay

Not all animals on Serina have changed markedly in physical ways, even after hundreds of millions of years. Many birds have managed to remain conservative in their very successful basal anatomy - flying bipeds with beaks, which lay hard-shelled eggs and exhibit only largely superficial changes from Earth bird groups. They are the sparrowgulls. Save for the loss of one digit on their feet, they are largely unremarkable perching birds on the outside - relative to their strikingly different contemporaries at least - but inside is a different story. The sparrowgulls are on the whole exceptionally intelligent, far more so than their early canary ancestors. They have continued a trend established on Earth of increasing the size and efficiency of their brains and now exhibit the most densely packed neurons of any birds; they can lay claim to the most efficient brains of any birds alive today pound for pound, allowing birds no larger than finches and parakeets to engage in extraordinarily complex behaviors and cognitive ability on par with, and at times surpassing, the most intelligent of modern Earth birds as a matter of course; this level of intellect that was once an outlier among birds is now the average for sparrowgulls. Several million years ago, some of the sparrowgulls gave rise to the babbling jay - a truly sapient, self-aware creature. It was not to last long in a harsh and changing world, but many of its distant kin have survived and thrived. Notable for utilizing increasingly complex behavior more so than any extreme modification of their bodies to exploit the riches of their world, the sparrowgulls continue develop new and innovative ways of living in the Ultimocene, even as the world is quickly changing.

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One noteworthy sparrowgull species alive today can be found in the temperate forests along the northern coast of the icebox seaway. Extremely smart, these birds are not sapient to the degree their extinct relative was, but this has not stopped them from making one great stride of progress that the babbling jay did not; the farmerjay has developed agriculture.

Farmerjays are a species of small, jay-sized perching birds with pretty powder blue and green iridescent feathers fading to steel gray along their banded wings, which are native to some of Serina's last mild temperate forests. The climate here is cool and wet and supports very large numbers of terrestrial snails. Many birds and other animals utilize these snails as a food resource, molodonts crushing them whole with their teeth and other birds using curved bill hooks to pierce and extract the meat from the shells. But these creatures are all subject to periodic booms and busts of the snail populations, and so their numbers are dependent entirely on the abundance of their prey. When snails became overabundant, snail predator numbers increase too - but once the snails have been hunted to scarcity snail specialists' numbers drop off again until equilibrium is reached again, unable to readily adopt an alternate diet in the interim.

The farmerjays however have taken the predator and prey relationship to a new level by not merely hunting their snail prey, but cultivating them. Rather than eat all the snails where it finds them, the ancestor of the farmerjay roughly one million years ago began collecting and hoarding them in tree hollows for later consumption, along with other food sources - berries, seeds and killed insects. Though most of the snails were then recollected and eaten in times of abundance, in plentiful seasons more could be collected than the birds would reasonably consume. Surely some more of them merely crawled out and escaped, but in larders containing sufficient edible material of other sorts they would have little reason to do so and so they would frequently feed on the other food items left along with them, sometimes managing even to breed; most of the species the birds caught were live-bearing. Birds that provided more food to their snails would indirectly find themselves with more snails to eat later, and so some birds began to bring additional food purely to feed their snails. A tendency to collect a wider variety of things, not only edible to themselves, and bring them to their caches developed - and through a lot of trial and error, the birds figured out what food sources caused the snails to thrive and reproduce best. As soon as they learned that by adding such useless, inedible things and leaves and moss to their larders, they could produce more snails from few, this cultural knowledge - taught to chicks by parents and learned through imitation by peers - spread across the population, and a whole species turned from predator to farmer.

It became beneficial for each bird to maintain multiple such larders, as this would reduce the chance of it depleting any one entirely and allow the snails in those recently harvested to recover their numbers. This, however, put each bird into greater competition with others of its species for the limited resource of tree hollows usable as snail farms. Aggressive battles over the rights to a single larder would often result in opportunists of other related species taking the chance to raid their farms and so cause both farmerjays to lose a substantial portion of their food supply. The eventual result was instead a natural selection away from innate territoriality and towards less aggressive, more tolerant farmers which would be more inclined to cooperate in managing - and protecting - their snails.

The farmerjay today is extremely good at raising snails and eats little else. Living in social groups known as villages numbering up to a thousand birds, they have lost all territorial tendency of their ancestors and instead work together and share the spoils equitably. They collectively share their resources and maintain sometimes hundreds of larders over large stretches of forest and all work together to defend them from other bird species inclined to steal from them. The farmerjays tend to their snails with great devotion, removing soiled, wilted vegetation from the tree hollow corrals regularly and delivering fresh leaves, mushrooms, and fruit scraps for the snails to feed upon several times per days. They pluck pest insects such as crickets and beetles that are attracted by the snail's droppings or their edible eggs and so also find other secondary food sources in doing so. Cognitively intelligent and very capable of problem solving, the rancher is not necessarily consciously aware of what it is doing when it brings food to its livestock - it ha simply learned that by not eating all of the snails and giving them things it cannot eat itself, more snails will appear; this is a tremendous comprehension of future gains and short term impulse control, but does not necessarily mean the farmerjay exactly understands what it is doing. Some aspects of the birds' behavior has become innate; unless starved, will not empty a larder of all its snails, nor will it consume snails under a certain size (roughly half that of the adult) - not out of forethought that they will need to reproduce, but because the farmerjays of generations past that gluttonously ate all of their larders likely starved when there were no more to be found later on, taking their more reckless genes with them. The jay likely does not understand how the snails will produce more snails, only that if it leaves some in place it will not run out - but it has had to learn to count, or at least to mentally divide a total group into smaller parts, to ensure that enough snails are left that the colony doesn't die off, and so a selection for higher intelligence has occurred nonetheless.

The snails cared for by the farmerjays, meanwhile, have also undergone changes of their own. The most active snails would have quickly escaped when left in the first larders, and so the population was from the beginning comprised of only the most lazy specimens that would be content to sit and stay in place. Snails that bred most quickly would also be selected for, as slower-growing populations may not breed quickly enough to keep up with the appetite of the birds and so might all be consumed. With no major predators except the one which also ensured their survival the snails also needed less defense so that their shells shrunk and their bodies became larger. It is so that the farmerjays have selectively produced a truly domesticated species of snail that is no longer able to survive except under their care. Lazy, insatiably hungry and too large to retract fully into their shells, they lay about in piles in the larders, almost requiring that their food be dropped directly over them so that they can reach over and eat. They feed constantly even when they do not need to and so grow huge, five times the weight of the wild snails they descend from, allowing them to produce many more offspring. Kept fed and sheltered, the snails are even kept warm in winter - the farmers brood on them in groups as if they were their own chicks, alternating throughout the day so each takes just one or two hour shifts, keeping the tree holes they raise them in warm and allowing the snails to continue to breed through winter when they would naturally have to go dormant.

With a steady supply of nutritious food that only requires easily gathered leaves and plants to flourish, and with cooperation easing even this chore, the farmerjay has been freed from most of the rigors and challenged of life in the wild and is free to spend many hours each day freely playing and socializing after the snails are all tended - particularly in the summer when they do not need to be kept warm and the workload is lowest. In domesticating their snail livestock, this bird has also inadvertently begun to domesticate itself; no longer territorial like its ancestors, adults stay playful and extremely social as previously only their juveniles were, while other adult behaviors, such as monogamous pair bonding, have also reduced or been lost. Farmerjays are now primarily polygamous, mating freely with multiple partners, and the chicks are raised in communal creches by all of the adults in the village.

above: the farmerjay, one pictured holding a snail between its wings - a very unusual behavior for most birds, but normal for this group. The re-evolution of carrying behavior with the wings, lost sometime in Earth's Cretaceous period when birds specialized their forelimbs for flight, has returned in the sparrowgulls, which evolved to use their wings to carry their eggs and chicks to new nests when threatened by predators. Over time a fleshy pad evolved along the wrist and the alula adapted into a semi-opposable thumb; adaptations gained for handling their young are now also usable to hold food.