RAPTOR RED

FAMINE AND THE WING SHADOW AUGUST

It’s the time of summer drought. Streams fail, and the ponds dry up into dead layers of sun-hardened mud. The herds of plant-eaters flee the lowlands, and the predators who remain must squabble over a dwindling supply of meat. And it’s the time when famine pulls apart the social bonds of Utahraptor packs. The carnivore parents become lax in watching where their youngsters wander off to.

The alpha male deinonych can’t believe his good fortune. There, within easy striking distance, is a Utahraptor chick, wandering alone, without an adult in sight. The deinonych holds his 130-pound body as low as he can and chirps a hurry up! message to his two brothers.

We can kill that chick - before its parents know we’re here, he thinks. He’s hungry. But he’d try to kill the chick even if he were well fed. Predator species have spite hardwired into their behavior. Killing the competition before it’s grown up is always a good ecological strategy for meat-eaters.

The little Utahraptor chick has wandered off from its pack for the first time in its life. There’s no food back at the temporary nest the adults have built, and the baby raptor is sniffing at holes where the multis hide, the roly-poly furballs shaped like wood-chucks.

'Chck-chck-chck… chck. ' The chick runs to a hole where a plump multi is making its alarm call.

Fwwoop! The multi disappears down its burrow as if it were sucked by a vacuum.

Chck-chck-chck-chck-CHCK! Another multi twenty feet away makes a loud protestation at the chick’s presence. The foolish little Utahraptor turns and runs at him.

Just as the chick reaches his burrow, the multi ducks underground, and a third furball starts clicking his lungs out ten yards in the other direction.

Stupid chick - this will be easy, the deinonych leader thinks as he watches the little raptor get dizzy running back and forth across the multi colony.

The alpha deinonych crawls along a dry arroyo till he’s at the edge of the colony. With every zigzag maneuver, the chick gets closer and closer to the hidden predators. The furballs are so busy playing the decoy game with the chick that they don’t notice the deinonychs.

But up at three hundred feet, a very alert set of eyes has been watching. A huge white dactyl has been making silent spirals down from a thousand-foot altitude. He banks steeply to his left and makes a low-angle pass at the multi colony.

Dust clouds erupt in the overgrazed soil between the multi burrows. The dactyl’s immense white wings stir up a tornado of dried multi droppings and plant bits, and the swirling maelstrom of dirt and dung blinds the deinonychs. The Utahraptor chick falls over, gets up, runs back toward its nest, trips in a multi hole, gets up again, and is gone from view before the dust settles and the deinonychs can see what has happened.

To the deinonychs and the Utahraptor, the situation is life or death. To the dactyl, it’s a game.

The dactyl climbs to five hundred feet to survey the scene he’s created. He likes intervening in the lives of predators - it amuses him. He’s spent all his waking hours amusing himself, ever since that day in the spring when he decided he would not take a mate.

The great white dactyl is a very special case. He’s sixty years old, healthy, fit, his senses keen. He’s observed many generations of raptors in their struggles to raise families. He’s helped raise dozens of broods of his own species, with the help of five mates, all now dead.

Dactyls live longer than dinosaurs - a general advantage of life on the wing. If it survives the dangers of youth, a young adult dactyl can look forward to thirty or forty years, average lifespan. This particular dactyl is an old-timer even by pterodactyl standards. And he has decided this year that he has had enough. He will never breed again. He’s a biological oddity - a widower who is content.

The hidden hand of natural selection is nearly everywhere. Every time a dinosaur makes a choice that affects its reproductive success, the beast is playing the evolution game. Every time a bird helps her sister or her daughter or her granddaughter raise a brood, the act is recorded in the book of genetic success. Every time a turtle seeks a mate, the deed affects the standing of the turtle’s genes in the Darwinian playoff.

But the old dactyl has bowed out of the Great Game. He’s ended his own contribution to his gene pool entirely. He doesn’t breed himself, and he doesn’t help his kin to breed. In fact, he avoids all others of his species. He’s outlived his Darwinian usefulness, and he’s enjoying it immensely.

Joy is built in by evolution to keep animals doing what’s good for their genes. The great white dactyl flies because it gives him pleasure. Since he has given up the responsibilities of reproduction, he’s free to make up the rules of life as he goes along. He likes soaring to heights where he can spy on the earthbound dinosaurs below. He likes flaunting his aerial expertise by zooming at the predators who rule the underbrush.

Pound for pound, his brain is even larger for his size than the raptors', and big brains demand to be exercised. So the white dactyl invents games. He dives at giant plant-eating dinosaurs, just to see them panic and mill around nervously, the adults trying to shield their calves. He zips close to the water when the crocs are sunning themselves. He likes to see the long sequence of splashes erupt as one crocodile after another launches itself into the algae-green water.

And the old dactyl likes eating. He likes sharks, lungfish, pond turtles, baby crocodiles, and the eggs of other dactyl species. The drought has cut off his seafood and poultry, but he’s in no danger of gastronomic deprivation. He has learned how to get Utahraptors to serve him aged red meat.

Raptor Red’s sister didn’t notice that one of the little chicks had wandered away from the pack. When the chick comes squawking back, she gives it a perfunctory greeting that does little to reassure the hungry, frightened youngster.

The young male watches the interaction between mother and chick, and he gets more and more worried. Raptor Red’s pack seems to be coming apart: The social bonds are getting weaker, and he’s afraid the group will disintegrate if the drought lasts much longer.

The raptor family has camped along one of the few rivers that is still flowing during this severe midsummer dry season. Adult raptors can go without food for a week, but they must have water every day - water to keep their nerves and muscles working, and water to cool their bodies. The small chicks suffer the most. Their fast-growing bodies make enormous demands for food, and they whine and nudge Raptor Red and her sister, begging at the adults' muzzles for food to be regurgitated. But the adults have no food.

Raptor Red looks at the chicks, then at her sister. Without making a sound or a gesture, the two adult females have come to a dreadful agreement: Soon they must abandon the two youngest chicks. Raptor Red’s sister has defended her offspring with deadly vigilance for five months, but now she’s ready to leave them to die.

It has to be this way. Adult predators must sacrifice their chicks so that the mothers can survive to next season, when they might breed again. The cruel calculus of evolution permits no sentimentality. Save the children first! is a motivation that would kill off the entire genetic line, mother and children both. It would be gene-foolish for Raptor Red’s sister to risk her life now - she might have twenty more reproductive seasons, so any one set of chicks is expendable.

All through the ages, most predator young die during the famine season - raptor chicks die in the Early Cretaceous, just as allosaur chicks died in the preceding Jurassic, and just as lion cubs will starve to death, abandoned in the summer on the Serengeti.

The Utahraptor chicks don’t realize that this could be their last day. But they do have an instinctive urgency; their genes have turned on their last-ditch defense, a pitiful display of begging designed to appeal to their adult protectors.

Raptor Red’s stomach tightens into a knot. She feels very empty and looks away from the chicks. The young male walks slowly over and bumps her snout. She doesn’t respond. The famine will drive them apart soon.

When the herbivore herds provide abundant victims, it’s best for the pack to stay together, so that two or three raptors can bring down big, dangerous prey. But when big herbivores disappear, the raptors must revert to a more primitive mode of life, searching for biological garbage, the small prey and chewed-up leftovers of the ecosystem. That mode of life is best carried out by single predators operating alone.

Raptor Red has been there before, and so has her male consort. They know their bond is tentative.

They are consorts now, not yet pledged to lifelong partnership. In Raptor Red’s mind her loyalties go like this: Give up the chicks first; then if necessary, give up her consort. Only if the famine gets truly terrible will she consider leaving her sister.

In times of famine it’s best to sleep during midday, so Raptor Red finds a comfortable spot, partly shaded by a dead cycad tree. The dreamtime offers a refreshing escape from hunger.

Raptor Red jerks her head, suddenly awake. She’s been daydreaming about food. She’s seen lovely iguanodon haunches, pink and fresh, floating by. Then there were images of plump torsos, neatly stripped of their armored skin, dancing slowly with each other.

She chomps her teeth twice. Now she can feel the meat against her gums. Hmmmm… meat, wonderful meat, soft and warm.

She closes her eyes tight, and a chorus line of trees pull up their roots and saunter around, their trunks metamorphosing into iguanodon drumsticks.

Chmp - chmp - chmp. Her jaws make involuntary chewing motions.

She opens one eye. Great piles of cumulus clouds move slowly. She closes the eye. The clouds turn pale pink, then red, then red-brown. They’re airy mounds of liver now, succulent and warm. She squeezes her eyes shut. She feels her body become lighter. She’s airlifted upward. She soars among the liver-clouds. She lowers her muzzle and dives into the top of the biggest one.

Chmp - chmp - chmp - chmp. She can feel the soft dino-innards against her gums.

Her empty stomach moans, and something twists inside. The liver-clouds turn pale. Their texture and taste evaporate. Raptor Red’s eyes half open. She sees the clear sky. Her conscious brain takes over -insisting that the parade of dino-steaks exists only in that other reality, dreamtime. But she doesn’t want to leave the feast, and she tries to re-enter the dream. She closes her eyes, and the liver-clouds reappear, but farther away.

Raptor Red’s dream is cut short by a wide object passing over her head. Something was flying just a few yards above, something very large.

The instinctive fear of pterodactyls kicked in the millisecond the wing-wake touched Raptor Red’s head. Even with her eyes closed, the slight cooling effect of the disturbed air is enough to trigger the dactyl-fear response. When she was a chick, this instantaneous response saved her life more than once.

She ducks and leans to her left. She sees a grand expanse of white, the underside of a set of wings many yards wide. The winged creature makes no sound whatever. In a few seconds the dactyl is a hundred yards away, spiraling upward on thermal currents generated by the morning sun’s heat, recycled into the air through the heat given off by the warmth of the soil.

Raptor Red sits up straight and watches the dactyl. The recognition centers in her brain register the wingtip markings - three green bands. She instantly relaxes a bit. She raises her muzzle and sniffs deeply. A faint olfactory trail lingers in the air. It’s a familiar scent. She knows this particular winged beast. He’s been her distant companion for as long as she can remember. He’s never been a threat to her or her family.

The big dactyl rises rapidly to a thousand feet and pauses. Then he utters a quick burst of chirps. Raptor Red’s male consort and her sister are awake now too, staring intently at the acrobatics.

The dactyl zooms down in a dive, crossing over the raptor pack at fifty feet, then climbing another hundred to zip over the treeline to the south.

The raptor sisters raise their bodies up, extending knees and ankles and lean forward in anticipation. They know what to expect. The young male follows their lead.

The dactyl disappears behind the trees. Raptor Red blinks and stares and blinks.

Without a sound the white wings with green bars reappear in a near-vertical climb, five hundred yards away. Six raptor eyes are fixed on the movement.

Raptor Red knows this aerial display might mean fresh food soon. Real food - not dreamtime drumsticks.

She remembers well how she met the white dactyl, years ago. It was when she was taken out on her first hunt. The Utahraptor family had gathered around an armor-plated dinosaur, one of three whose drowned bodies the adult raptors had found on a riverbank. Raptor Red and her sisters had been led by their mother to the one-ton carcasses, fragrant with sundried blood and fresh viscera spilled on the pale yellow sand.

Her mother had prepared the chicks' meal. Great gashes were ripped into the torsos of the prey, gashes big enough for Raptor Red to stick her head in up to her shoulders. It was an exciting, adult experience. Up till then, Raptor Red and her sister had fed on regurgitated meat slabs, brought back to the nest in the throat pouches of their mother or father.

Raptor Red’s eyes had widened when she saw where the meat slabs came from. She was vibrating with excitement when she got to rip her own meat portions from the still-warm carcass. Then the dactyls came. They swooped low, and her parents snarled. For the rest of the day, she watched her mother and father chase off the dactyl scavengers. But they never left - the vulturine pterodactyls had hung around, clattering their yard-long jaws in exasperation.

On the third day the raptor family had eaten their fill. The adults didn’t care about the airborne scavengers anymore. A flock of black-winged dactyls, Ornithodesmus, swarmed over the carcasses and began to tear off meat strips - when a tremendous white object flew at great speed into the mass of wings and bodies. Black-winged dactyls scattered like feathers from an exploded seabird.

Raptor Red was fascinated by that white dactyl. It inspired fear in all other flying creatures, but it never tried to attack the raptor chicks or come close to the adults. Time and time again she would see the same white flying giant appear at kill sites after the raptors had satisfied their appetites. Again and again Raptor Red and her sisters watched the lone white giant disperse all the other scavengers.

Raptor Red gradually accepted the white dactyl as a benign element in her world, an elegant aerial camp-follower who never pushed his participation in the feast.

Raptor Red’s parents didn’t worry about their chicks when the white dactyl was around. He functioned like an aloof baby-sitter or sheep dog. He kept the other flying predators away, and often chased the smaller land predators too. Raptor Red learned that raptors could, on occasion, profit from watching the white dactyl. When the great white beast flew in ostentatious circles a quarter-mile away, the raptor pack would investigate. Often they’d find a big dead dinosaur half-hidden in the undergrowth. The raptors would feed. The dactyl, whose snout was too weak to break through the skin of an intact carcass, would wait patiently until he was allowed to glean scraps from the dissected body.

On this day in the middle of the August drought, the appearance of the white dactyl is most welcome. The Utahraptor sisters get up and lead the chicks at a trot toward the sand flat beyond the treeline. Raptor Red’s male consort sits in confusion. He’s uneasy with all dactyls - but he decides to trust Raptor Red’s judgment and rushes to catch up.

The white dactyl is very fond of the giant raptors in Raptor Red’s family. They seem to have a more immediate effect on their surroundings than any other species. And they respect his position as Dactyl Emeritus of the ecosystem, a position that entitles him to scraps from every kill the big raptors make. He’s spotted a mummified Astrodon body, and he wants his raptor friends to help share this multi-ton hoard of meat and entrails. He can’t break through the mummified hide himself, but he knows that Raptor Red and her sister can.

The white dactyl definitely does not like Utah-raptors' smaller relative, the deinonychs. Those raptors travel in large unruly packs, and they’re rude to dactyls. They’ve tried to ambush him when he’s fed from their kills. So he buzzes them when they least expect it.

He never leads deinonychs to carcasses, the way he’s doing now for Raptor Red’s pack.

The raptor sisters break through the dense thicket of saplings and rush out over the hot sand. They pause, sniffing the stale air.

There it is! their olfactory systems scream inside their brains. They run to the spot where a huge carcass lies buried under sand and driftwood.

Utahmptor claws pull through the suntanned hide.

Ribs are broken by raptor hindlegs pulling on claws hooked through the astro’s chest.

Raptor Red and her sister push their scale-covered snouts through the gaps ripped into the body cavity - and find gastronomical heaven. Hunks of liver and lung, nicely seasoned by early decomposition, slide down the sisters' throats. It’s a splendid feeling.

Raptor Red’s mood changes as her digestive enzymes turn on all through her stomach and intestines. The imminent prospect of loneliness evaporates. She grabs a big piece of astro innards and bounds over to the young male, bobbing her head.

For me? he asks with a submissive lowering of his head.

YES! Raptor Red answers by shoving the food right up to his upper lip.

The big dactyl waits till the adult Utahraptors are finished, then pokes his long snout deep into the carcass and gleans select morsels.

The chicks tiptoe up to the carcass, still afraid of the dactyl. They nip at shreds of meat hanging from leg joints. Soon the sensation of filled bellies makes them bolder. One of the young chicks makes mock-charges at the big old dactyl, who’s perched on a low branch. Holding its head low and growling in a falsetto voice, the chick runs forward, then jams its toes into the sand, screeching to a stop with its head raised and mouth open.

The old-timer in the tree doesn’t move. He lets the chick get closer and closer. Each mock-attack makes the chick braver - and more self-deluded. At its sixth charge the Utahraptor-ette stomps its feet directly below the branch where the dactyl sits like a statue.

There’s no sound, no movement from the big flier. His wings remain tightly folded against his body, making his body mass appear small.

The chick is puzzled. It rises as high as it can go, sniffing loudly. Its snout tip touches the branch where the dactyl sits. It moves the snout to the underside of the dactyl toes. The chick nudges the dactyl’s feet.

The white wings snap open in one quick movement. The great wing-finger, equivalent to our human ring finger, sweeps upward at the wrist, unfurling the immense white wing surface. In an instant the dactyl’s size seems to increase a hundredfold.

The chick is enveloped by the dactyl’s shadow.

Clunk!

The chick tries to accelerate backward but falls over instead. It flails its arms and legs, trying to get up, turn around, and run away all at once.

The dactyl stands, wings outstretched, motionless.

The chick tumbles over itself and rolls up to Raptor Red. It gets up, mouth wide open in horror, and leans hard against Raptor Red’s side. She glances sideways at the chick and gives it a rude shove.

The chick hurls itself toward its mother, squealing.

Raptor Red’s sister looks over at her chick, at the dactyl, then back at the chick, then resumes chewing on some gray-brown meat from the inner thigh of the dinosaur carcass.