The Graspbird

The Graspbird (Linguornis dexter) is a species of large raspbird that lives throughout a highly productive belt of tropics and subtropics, bounded on one end by Abeli's eastern mountains and on the other by the Ten-Month Savanna of central Loxodia. The in-between areas of Equatorial Loxodia, Abelox, and Sub-Abeli contain Apterra's most diverse and stable terrestrial communities, and the rich forest floors of these regions serve as the perfect habitat for one of the planet's largest avian megafauna. Graspbirds, though only about two meters high at the shoulder, are more than double the weight of their girraspbird cousins. If the latter species is analogous to the girraffes of Holocene Earth, then graspbirds are like giant hogs, rooting through the forest for tough, hidden food sources like roots, fungi, and smaller animals in their burrows. They are also happy to snack on more accessible items like berries, nuts, and carrion, and on rare occasions they even actively hunt animals up to fifty kilos in weight. Such a versatile diet is made possible by this species' twist on the raspbird family's defining trait.

Like all raspbirds, the graspbird has a long tongue that it uses to collect and process food. Most extant raspbird species, like the common ancestor of the group, use keratinized projections along the tongue to collect tough vegetation. The graspbird, on the other hand, descends from the spadebilled raspbird of the Late Muricene, meaning it initially specialized for grassland life. On the ancient woodlouse-grassland, it was more advantageous to turn the tongue into a prehensile grasping organ that could wrap around clumps of grass and yank them out of the ground, roots and all. Thus, the ancestors of graspbirds traded abrasiveness for dexterity and strength, and over time they developed other novel traits to support their new way of feeding. First, the tip of the tongue split in two, creating a pair of points that could wrap around larger bundles of grass than before. This also made it possible for these ancestral graspbirds to take advantage of new food opportunities; it was at this stage when they first began incorporating meat into their diets. They began making forays into wooded environments where they would previously have been outcompeted by their basal relatives. One subgroup became specialized for life in this context around the time when Ice Age glaciation reached its fullest extent, remaining small and cryptic through the beginning of the Arthrocene.

The proto-graspbirds living around three million years ago once again became divided between two different niches. One returned to being a dedicated grazer, in this case feeding on the high-quality vegetation that grew in clearings under gaps in the Early Arthrocene canopy. At the same time, its sister species moved deeper into the dense tropics, into jungles so thick with plant life that they could evolve larger sizes and still remain safely camouflaged in the darkness. This species, known as Linguornis prodexter, abandoned a foliage-based diet, coming to rely on its ability to find nutrition hidden away in obscure corners of the rainforest. It evolved gripping ridges at the tips of its tongue-tines, which eventually specialized further into opposable, finger-like appendages. The midsection of the tongue, just after the split, became a pair of flat pads that could hold items steady while the tine-tips manipulated it. A pair of pouches grew in the back of the throat to store the tines when they weren't in use. All the while, this species continued growing bigger, eventually outmassing all other raspbirds.

The modern graspbird is an even more massive animal, with an insatiable appetite and no natural predators big enough to bring down an adult. It is, consequently, a fearless creature, living in herds not for safety but for the sake of securing yet another new food source: arboreal isopods, which now make up nearly a tenth of their caloric intake. When a herd stumbles upon an ailing tree, they will work together to push it to the ground, feasting on the hundreds of thousands of tiny bugs that come crawling out to defend their fallen home. In response to this behavior, many Scansoriarthriform woodlice have recently evolved to abandon their host tree at the first sign of sickness; better to set out in search of a new palm-grass than to simply wait for a hungry graspbird herd to come along and destroy the colony. In turn, graspbirds no longer bother trying to fell any tree they can't see pill bugs crawling around on. In practice, this means they mostly bring down trees that have been injured by a sudden event like a storm or defoliated by creatures like Foliopteryx, leaving alone those with slow, obvious illnesses that give the isopods plenty of time to make their escape. The clearings they create will eventually become nurseries for the next generation of trees, but in their first few years they will serve as critical habitat for the graspbird's tiny cousin, the Glengrazer (Linguornis minimus).