RAPTOR RED

RAPTOR RED APRIL

The female Utahraptor doesn’t have a name for herself. Her brain doesn’t operate with words, not even with silent, unspoken syllables. It works with images, colorful bursts of memory that make up a dreamlike history the brain constantly updates. Every day new experiences and new associations from her senses rearrange the symbolic registry.

In her own brain the raptor identifies herself with the symbols she learned as a chick: me … raptor … red.

We can call her Raptor Red, because that’s how she identifies herself in her own mental imagery.

Ever since she was very young, eight years ago, a chick in her mother’s nest, she has learned to recognize the sound and scent and - most important - the color of her own kind. Before she opened her eyes for the first time - as she struggled inside the egg, trying to break free of the camouflaged shell - her nostrils sucked in the first breath of air, air filled with the heavy, close-in scent of mother and father, sister and brothers.

That first invasion of sensory particles traveled down her nostril tubes and into the olfactory chambers built into her skull, right in front of her eyes. The airborne particles were caught like microscopic bugs on the sticky flypaper of her sensory membranes. Biochemical detector cells were galvanized into action as soon as the particles dissolved in the thin mucous lining. Electrical discharges, a thousand each millisecond, lit up the nerve pathways leading from the olfactory chamber to the massive olfactory stalk of her brain.

She hatched with the eyes of an eagle and the snout of a wolf. And her brain was already prepared to receive the imprint of its parent-smell and parent-color that defined me.

The imprinting impulse was hardwired into her hatchling brain. No thought was necessary - it was automatic. First came the scent. This smell - my kind - safety - food was the essence of the message recorded.

From that moment on the female raptor could lift her snout, sniff the incoming breeze, and detect the exciting presence of my kind from as far away as two miles.

Then came sight. She opened her huge, clear eyes on the third day after hatching. A blurred image of a snout filled her visual field. The snout had a delicate strip of meat hanging from it. The rank odor triggered a quick response from the raptor chick.

She squeaked in delight, snatched the meat, and gurgled it down. This was the first time she saw what she had been eating for the previous forty-eight hours. The color of meat was now recorded in her brain, along with the odor of meat, and would stay that way for the rest of her life.

Another color too was recorded. Her mother’s snout had a bright crimson streak running aft from the nostril. When the raptor chick’s eyes gradually became focused, she stared long and hard at that streak. Red-snout… mother.

The raptor chick knew that two different adults, each with a very different scent-identity, had been offering her meat from the moment she had hatched. Mother smelled very different from the other.

She was raised equally by her mother and father. When the raptor mother left the nest for a day-long hunt, the other took her place. The raptor chick’s sense of smell told her that the other was a raptor parent who was, in some incomprehensible way, fundamentally foreign. Later in her life she would come to understand that this foreign property was maleness.

Ghurk-snurg-GULP.

The raptor chick glommed onto a thick hunk of meat hanging from her father’s jaws. As she swallowed, she saw the bright red streak on his snout -wider, more vivid than her mother’s: red-snout… my kind too. Another vital bit of information was added to the hard disk of her mental computer.

The chick sensed that her own individuality came from both parents - she could smell herself, she could smell her own shed skin, her own droppings, and they all smelled like a combination of mother and father. She had a concept that mother was half of me and father was half of me.

The double bond between chick and father and chick and mother was the only social union Raptor Red enjoyed for four months. The other raptor chicks in the nest were only annoyances and competitors. Her three brothers and sisters (it was a big brood by raptor standards) were greedy eating machines, always trying to steal scraps of meat.

Most raptor chicks die before they are a year old. The concept of sharing does not exist in the chicks' brains - at least not in the first few months. Grab NOW! is the only action-provoking thought.

It has to be that way. Life expectancy is so dismal that only the most aggressive, most selfish chicks survive to leave the nest. Without this childhood cruelty, raptors would cease to evolve, cease to adapt, cease to exist.

Raptor Red was the most successfully selfish chick in her brood. She snatched the most food. She grew faster than her sibs. She was first out of the nest, first to join mother and father on a hunt. A sister was next. Once out of the nest, much of the chick-chick rivalry evaporated. She played with her sister, and the two bossed the male chicks around.

Each brother and sister had its own unique scent-signature, and Raptor Red learned every one so well that the slightest whiff from a hundred feet away would tell her who was there. Her sense of smell told her that her siblings shared her identity, just as her parents did - in her mind, brothers and sisters were half of me.

For her first two and a half years, all her loyalty was to those who were half of me. For all this time Raptor Red would flee any Utahraptor who did not smell like family. She joined her parents in hissing at strangers.

She and her sister would chase away chicks from neighboring packs when they got too close.

Family was everything - until the young male came, a stranger who courted her. Raptor Red felt her fear of foreigners melt away as she watched him perform the courtship ritual. He smelled completely un-family - not part of me. And she knew that was right for her mate.

She had been adult in body form, full grown, for five years when she and her mate attacked the astro on the Utah floodplain. They had been mated for three years. But prey had been so scarce each breeding season that the pair did not dare to produce chicks.

Now as she sits in the mud next to her dead mate and the enormous inert hulk of the Astrodon, she experiences feelings that are new: despair and loneliness. Raptors are social beings. They need the companionship of their own kind. They feel a deadly unease when alone.

And there is a form of sorrow, She doesn’t eat any part of the dead Astrodon. But she does stay next to the crumpled body of her mate for thirty-six hours. On the morning of the second day, huge, sickle-shaped shadows pass over her body. Instinctively she looks up and hisses loudly.

Shadows like these generated her first sensation of fear when she was a chick. She didn’t have to learn to hate shadows from the sky. Nearly all dinosaurs are born with the same preprogrammed response. Those that are unfortunate enough to hatch with a mutant gene that eliminates the shadow-fear don’t survive longer than a week. They are snatched from the nest by jaws from the sky.

Raptor Red hisses again, flexes her legs, and leaps as high as she can, her jaws snapping shut three times in rapid-fire succession. The dactyl leaves.

Another dactyl, younger and more foolish, soars in low, behind the raptor’s back, and stabs at her with his spike-toothed jaws.

She jumps. Tiny dots of red show where the dactyl teeth pricked her. One dactyl she can handle. But the sight of the dead Astrodon is a visual lure attracting six, then twelve, then two dozen of the aerial monsters with twenty-foot wingspans. All are young, hungry, and overconfident.

The dactyls, a species of Ornithocheirus, are beautiful. All their undersurfaces are brilliant shades of pale brown and white. The noontime sunlight makes their body covering of fine, hairlike scales glisten. Iridescent green marks the beaks of the males; blue denotes the females.

Their long, narrow, recurved wings are under the control of an exquisite apparatus of tendons, ligaments, skin, and muscle. Slight twitches of thigh and knee adjust the tension of the wing membrane held between forelimb and hindlimb. Leading-edge flaps, moved by a special pronglike bone attached to the wrist, are constantly expanding and contracting to maximize the efficiency of airflow over the wing.

Even when the dactyls fly so slowly that it seems impossible they could stay aloft, the wing machinery works flawlessly. When airspeed falls as a dactyl goes into a slow climb, the wrist bones open up a slot in the leading edge, letting some of the air rush through the hole and preventing a stall that would cause the wing to lose its lift.

His weak sense of smell will not tell him who the winged victim is. But he must know. The lone dactyl makes a swooping pass at the mangled remains on the ground, and then he sees, in his peripheral vision, a bit of blue on what seems to be a head lying near the astro. The young male sees the identification marks on the head, and he knows the truth. His mate is gone, her body dismembered.

For four days Raptor Red travels during all the daylight hours, walking morning and afternoon, avoiding the midday heat. During the nights she crouches under the upturned roots of fallen trees. Even though the days are hot, she shivers most evenings. It rains just before sundown every day. The nighttime wind blowing across her rain-wet hide sucks out her body heat at a terrible rate.

But the metabolic furnace within her body is up to the thermal challenge. Waves of shivering spread through her muscles, and her heat production goes up by another factor of four, keeping all her vital organs at an optimum temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Still, shivering eats up heat calories so fast that by day two of her trek, Raptor Red is ravenously hungry. She has to find meat - fuel for her hot-blooded body. She sniffs along the fern-tangled bank of a creek, now swollen with rainwater. She has learned from experience that meaty tidbits can be found washed up in just such locales.

She thrusts her snout into a clump of horsetail reeds.

Yeech! Her olfactory chambers are choked by the suffocating aroma of half-rotten lungfish.

More carefully now, she investigates the three-hundred-pound fish. Only half is totally disgusting. The rear half is edible. She cuts the offending front end off with her sharp foreclaws.

Gulp-chunk-chug. A hundred pounds of fish disappear down her gullet.

An hour later her careful streamside search is rewarded again: a dead turtle, twenty-five pounds, with its head bitten off - probably by a crocodile. One gulp and it’s gone, shell and all.

Raptors evolved as group hunters of big game. Raptor Red killed dozens of multi-ton dinosaurs when she hunted as part of a pair, first with a sibling, later with her mate. But evolution rewards flexibility too. A lone raptor is like a lone wolf…eat-eater who must be able to forage for small fry.

Raptor Red is surviving by herself, picking through the zoological garbage thrown up by the overflowing creek. She’s lucky. It’s an unusually wet spring. The turbid mixing of river, pond, and stream waters carries a rich hoard of dead and dying aquatic creatures. Her powerful olfactory sense serves her well in discovering carrion treasures hidden in places even the keenest eyes would never discover.

Raptor Red realizes that she is now following a faint scent-trail. Her olfactory nerves can just barely detect the presence, far upstream, of warm dinosaur bodies - raptor bodies - and the prospect of rejoining her own kind raises her spirits.

As she climbs over a logjam of conifer trunks, she stops and stares and sniffs, raises her snout as high as it will go, sniffs again loudly, and stares.

There are raptors, five of them, three hundred yards away.

But something is wrong. She gets a big dose of scent, and her olfactory nerves are overwhelmed with biochemical clues. Raptor scent, definitely. But her brain evaluates the scent-rich air and concludes: Raptors - but not MY KIND!

She’s suddenly angry and afraid, confronted by a raptor so close to her own scent and yet so distinctly wrong.

Two of the foreign raptors approach slowly, holding their heads low in a submissive, non-threatening posture.

She sniffs loudly. These are not small raptors. Too big to be Deinonychus, and the scent is wrong for Deinonychus.

Now she senses maleness in the two approaching raptors. They bob their heads in a greeting that’s almost like the way her mate used to greet her.

But there’s something wrong in their head-bobbing dance too. These foreign males don’t do it right, and their flawed choreography makes her even more agitated.

My kind… not my kind… Her brain struggles with the mixed signals.

Now she can see the color band on their snouts. It’s not red. It’s yellow. She has never been with a family member with a yellow snout patch.

She thinks to herself. Images of self-recognition express, My kind, red snout - my kind, Raptor - Red.

HsssscreeeeEEEEEEECH!!!!

Her brain can’t stand it anymore. She attacks, making huge deadly arcs with her deadliest claw.

She kicks up dust. She swooshes her tail from side to side.

The two foreign males freeze for a second, then bound away in full-speed retreat.

Then Raptor Red turns and runs away too.

She has no conscious way of understanding what has just happened. Deep inside her brain, the thought of being courted by Yellow Snouts is hateful.

The most important task she has had to perform, all through her life, ever since hatching, has been to identify my kind. To Raptor Red, the Yellow Snouts are hideous liars and impostors. They have most of the correct signals for my kind, yet they distort proper Utahraptor language and use foreign movements, and they give out the wrong scent.

Raptor Red snarls to herself, paces back and forth, and flexes her killing-claw in angry spasms. She’s sure she has saved herself from some hideous, unknown fate. And she has. If she had mated with a Yellow Snout, he would have abandoned her. And she would have been cursed with chicks born dead or deformed or sterile.

Raptor Red doesn’t know that this hatred is what has kept her species alive. It’s her hate of Yellow Snouts that protects her own reproductive hopes. Any Red Snout attracted to a Yellow Snout mate would condemn her own genes to death. The hybrid chicks would never survive to a healthy adulthood. Natural selection has to be ruthless - genes that encourage such lethal unions are weeded out by death and infertility.

Raptor Red’s inborn horror of Yellow Snouts is reinforced by dim memories from childhood. She saw her kind, her parents, drive them away. Back in her homeland in Asia, Yellow Snouts were distant neighbors who hunted in the densely forested highlands. Raptor Red’s species preferred the more open low country. When members of the two species met, they fled, or they attacked.

Even when she was a chick, Raptor Red’s nose told her that Yellow Snouts were almost my kind. Her nose told the truth. Yellow Snouts are her ancestors.

Fifty thousand years before, the two species had been one and the same, a mountain-loving yellow-muzzled predator. Yellow Snouts kept to the ancestral habitats of dense forests, but a small part of the ancestral population became isolated on the far side of a huge river. That small population evolved different hunting techniques, different recognition colors, and different courtship colors. It became a new Utahraptor species, Raptor Red’s species.

When the red-snouted Utahraptors finally met their yellow-snouted kin, their genes could no longer mix.

Raptor Red’s species is lucky to be alive. New species are evolutionary experiments that usually turn out to be inferior to the parent species. And parent species usually exterminate their daughters.

But not the Red Snouts. Their adaptive equipment proved superior to their ancestor’s, and when the two met, Red Snouts usually pushed out Yellow Snouts, the daughter species exterminating the parent species like Darwinian Lizzie Bordens.

Here and there the two can coexist, wherever especially dense cover permits the Yellow Snouts to escape their more aggressive red-snouted kin.

Raptor Red moves away at a quick pace, still agitated from her meeting with her near relations. If she were with her family, she’d attack. But she’s alone, and she wants to get away, so she descends into a low series of dry lake beds that offer ground more to her liking than the coniferous woodland where the Yellow Snout pack is staking out their hunting territory.

Here she stays for a week. She is searching for a Utahraptor of her kind.