RAPTOR RED

TOO SKINNY FOR PARENTHOOD (AND TOO FULL OF TICKS) MAY

Raptor Red knows she’s too skinny. She looks at her thigh, pokes at it with her snout, and looks again. It’s muscular but very lean. Two weeks on her own have been hard on her diet. A single Utahraptor is not an efficient predator, and she has subsisted on the equivalent of raptor finger food…ead croc here, a half-decayed lungfish there, a dried-up iguanodon carcass in between.

Male Utahraptors prefer plump, well-fed females.

Raptor Red doesn’t think this through. She doesn’t have to. She was born with the same mate-search image that males of her species have. Her genes encode high standards, and in her first breeding season she sought a tall male filled out with muscle. All the young unattached females looked for the strongest males with the plumpest thighs.

Raptor Red’s mother was a well-muscled raptor too, and this image reinforced the inborn standard of Utahraptor beauty.

Plump thighs are an outward sign of good hunters and good genes. Since father and mother Utahraptors share the burden of nest-making and chick-feeding nearly equally, young males and females scrutinize every potential mate. Skepticism rules courtship. Toward each potential mate, the undercurrent of thought in Raptor Red’s mind was I’ll risk myself in reproduction with you only if you can convince me that you’re healthy, smart, and trustworthy. Raptor Red didn’t give even a second look to scrawny males during that first courtship season. But when a thickly muscled male bounced over to her and initiated a most vigorous mating dance, her courtship incredulity was overcome.

Now she’s lost her mate, and she’s skinny. Too skinny, she suspects, to be attractive.

She nuzzles the base of her tail. It’s also too thin. Males and females check out each other’s tails carefully during courtship - the tail base is supposed to be plump and well filled out, with fat layers over the muscle. When a raptor isn’t eating well, the tail fat is the first layer to disappear.

Raptor Red stares hard at a crimson spot she sees near the tip of her tail. This spot is even more worrisome. Persistent wounds, even little ones, automatically disqualify a raptor from the ranks of the most desirable. She scrapes at the mark with her foreclaws, then licks it. It’s not a scab - just a bit of dried lungfish meat that got stuck to her skin at her last meal.

Raptor Red carries out her sign-marking chores in the final minutes of daylight. She finds a suitable tree, tall, straight, with a thick trunk. She reaches high and scratches long claw marks on the bark, releasing sweet-smelling sap. Then she rubs her throat on the tree, leaving her telltale signature from glands on the underside of her jaws.

She pauses and adds the strongest signal of her gender and species…ung pile. No raptor of the wrong species will miss the message now: I’m an adult Utahraptor of the Red Snout species. If you’re a healthy Red Snout male, consider ME. All others, LEAVE ME ALONE!

That’s all she can do now. The evening breeze will carry the scent-marks to any red-snouted Utahraptor within a five-mile radius. She has advertised her-self. Now she must wait.

The sunset is glorious, illuminating Raptor Red’s temporary nest with crimson and turning the dried bracken into incandescent lace. She’s feeling better. Beautiful colors always lift her spirits. She begins to I drift off to sleep.

Bing. A little alarm bell goes off in her head, triggered by her olfactory sense. A stream of molecules has entered her nostrils and hit special sensors inside her muzzle.

Bing - wake up - bing - male alert - male alert.

Raptor Red jumps to her feet, every muscle tensed. She sniffs deeply at the evening air. Yes, that’s male scent, and it’s her species. She raises her body and weaves her head back and forth, staring upwind. There is somebody out there.

Snff… snff… SNFFFF! Utahraptor male. SNFFFF! Red Snout. My kind.

A tall figure walks out of the shadows, walking with exaggerated strides. His head dips down and up in a deep bow. Raptor Red dips her head just a bit. She’s hopeful - but suspicious. Raptor courtships are supposed to begin in the morning and go on all day, to give both sides ample opportunity to evaluate every move, every body part, every scent. She’s lonely and unhappy with her lot as a single hunter. But she’s not desperate.

Snff! Good. He’s Red Snout, but not close kin. Her scent-evaluation centers automatically go through their checklist. Raptor Red’s instincts won’t let her accept courtship from family.

The male moves closer, bowing every few steps. Raptor Red moves out away from the bracken and into a little clearing where she can see better. The tall male comes to the edge of the open space but then stops. His graceful bows become awkward.

Raptor Red’s heart sinks. She begins to think that the tall male is hiding something. If he followed the rules, he’d come up close.

She stamps her left foot: GrrrrrKK!

He stops, bows, and takes a half step. Raptor Red sees his body contours highlighted by the warm afterglow of the sun. He is very tall - and muscular too. She’s beginning to hope that he’s just shy.

They circle each other. Raptor Red becomes defensive - she thinks he’s staring at her thin tail. And he is. He backs away, forcing her to follow and take the initiative in the dance.

Don’t go away - don’t go away - don’t go away, Raptor Red thinks as she tries her hardest to appear graceful and strong and healthy.

The male turns broadside to her, a gesture that conveys indecision.

Raptor Red begins to feel uneasy about some of the male’s moves. He’s rushing the courtship preliminaries, violating Utahraptor etiquette. Now he walks beside her and tries to place his flank against hers. It’s a clumsy attempt to apply the leaning gesture, where one raptor applies gentle pressure through its torso and the other raptor is supposed to respond with a slight push in the opposite , direction.

It’s an intimate form of physical contact, usually reserved for raptor pairs who know and trust each other. Raptor Red used to spend hours leaning against her sister when they were youngsters, and she and her mate enjoyed the lean in the early evening, after they had hunted and fed together.

She has missed this type of contact terribly over the last few days. But she feels her skin flinch when it touches his. She doesn’t like the way he presses his hide against her shoulder. It is a dishonest touch. Raptor Red stands still and makes a huge, sweeping bow - and at the bottom of her courtship curtsey, she sees the marks on the male’s throat. SPOTS/ her brain screams. HE’S GOT SPOTS/ Raptor Red thrusts her snout under the tall male’s chin. He pulls his head away, but not before Raptor Red gets a good look.

Ticks - the red spots are ticks. Raptor Red knows well the telltale sign of parasite infestation. She was born with a horror of little red spots. She has seen raptor chicks and raptor adults slowly succumb to tick disease, losing vigor every day.

She grabs the male’s neck and looks very carefully. Small black dots are moving around inside the red marks.

He’s got bugs!

Raptor Red jumps backward three steps, raises her head, and screams a mixture of threat and alarm. The male looks perplexed.

She lunges at him with all six foreclaws slashing circles through the air.

He gets the message. He slinks off into the darkness. In a few minutes his fading scent assures her that he’s in full retreat.

If Raptor Red’s thoughts could be put into language, they’d be, Males are such liars. I’m a bit underweight - but I don’t cover up my parasites. That bug-bitten loser is lucky I didn’t slice him into little pieces.

She goes back to her nest, fluffs up the bed of dry ferns, plops herself down, and nibbles furiously at an iguanodon leg she stored there. Then she goes to sleep.

Raptor Red wakes up slowly, as is her custom. Before her conscious brain is alert, her senses have been scanning the air for sounds and smells. There are faint, distant scents from deinonychs and from some yellow-nosed raptors. And there is something else too, a scent that makes her eyes pop open. It’s close and it’s very familiar. It’s almost like her mother’s scent. Almost but not quite. But it’s definitely Raptor Red-Kind scent.

My kind… my family. The scent leads Raptor Red to a steep bank in a dried-up riverbed.

Two tiny Utahraptors, only three weeks old, and an older chick stumble out from a burrow. They squeak and sniff at Raptor Red. She sniffs back. Their scent is like an imperfect memory of her own childhood. She cocks her head and stares. Her mother? Her father?

Not father… not mother… but still part of myself - but less than half of me.

No. The chicks aren’t anyone she has met before. But Raptor Red’s olfactory computer gives her a galvanic message: One half of one half….hese chicks are one half of one half of myself… They are my sister’s children!

Raptor Red backs up and sits down. The chicks approach with hesitating steps, sniffing, running back, coming forward, sniffing again. Their noses tell them this is their aunt.

SsssssSSSSSSSS. A loud threat comes from the burrow. A big raptor head comes out, teeth bared. The head abruptly stops hissing.

Raptor Red sniffs loudly. This scent jolts her brain. One half of me… this adult female is one half of me.

I KNOW YOU!

The last time she smelled this scent was three years ago, on a cold day in Canada, the last day she was with her siblings. Before she and her mate began their invasion of the new southern lands.

Raptor Red dances a wild jig of greeting. She hops from one foot to another, going eeep-eeep-eeep like an overgrown chick.

It is her sister.

Early the following morning, a one-ton iguanodon is making contented leaf-munching noises as she feeds on low-growing cycad fronds. She clomps down on the tough palmlike leaves with her sharp beak. The saw-edged beak tip slices easily through the tough plant tissue. Her tongue automatically rolls the bitten-off pieces into a ball that is coated with saliva. With a gentle, efficient rhythm the plant-balls are transferred rearward to the chewing compartment, the oral cavity between the massive rows of molar teeth.

A low grinding sound, like a huge coffee mill, comes from within the iguanodon’s cheeks. Twice a second the mighty molars come together. Twice a second the jagged edges of enamel from a hundred tightly packed teeth slide past each other, trapping plant parts and shredding them. Twice a minute the tongue balls up the ground mass of food and pushes it to the rear of the mouth. Once a minute a lump can be seen in the throat. The lump passes down toward the stomach in a slow, smooth movement.

It’s the finest vegetarian food-processor in the Early Cretaceous, a system that can start with dry, hard, dust-covered cycad foliage and convert it into easily digested plant pulp.

The iguanodon has modest powers of self-awareness. She feels happy and complacent and content. She feels efficient, in a vague I’m doing what I should be doing and I’m doing it well sort of way.

Still the iguanodon is alert. Her sense of smell is superb. She keeps track of the rest of the herd a few hundred yards upwind. Her large, clear blue eyes sweep a full 360 degrees every second or two. Her eye sockets project outward from her forehead, like cow eyes or deer eyes, so right and left visual fields can cover a zone in front, to the side, and dead ahead.

A faint crack in the bush makes her stop chewing.

She focuses her eyes and ears forward. It’s totally silent now. She can’t detect a scent - the sound came from the left downwind. She starts backing away, toward her herd.

There’s another crack of dried twigs being stepped on.

She hears a soft patter of feet on wet meadow, coming from the right, obliquely downwind, between herself and her herd. She tries to turn.

Whummp! A half-ton weight, moving fast, hits her body high on the right side. She falls. Another heavy weight falls on her neck, pinning her to the ground.

The two Utahraptors kill their victim efficiently, cleanly, with a flurry of slashes, hindclaws and fore-claws together.

Raptor Red stands up and makes sure that the rest of the iguanodon herd isn’t massing for a counterattack. Iguanodons sometimes charge a hundred strong and try to trample raptors.

Not this time. A few iguanodons stand tall and sniff and stare. But then the herd begins to wander off in the opposite direction.

Raptor Red’s sister begins to remove meat and pieces of liver.

The iguanodons' brains record the fact that a new hunting pack of Utahraptor is on the scene. Since a pack of two is ten times more dangerous than two independent raptors, the iguanodons will be extra cautious in the near future.

In the evening Raptor Red huddles close to her sister’s chicks, keeping them warm and dry in a den in the brush. Her sister sits up most of the night, alert, guarding her kin.

The evening is unpleasant, with a light drizzle and enough breeze to make Raptor Red shiver now and then. But it doesn’t matter. She’s enjoying a sound she hasn’t heard for a long time. Her sister’s snoring.

The youngsters and their mother fall asleep right away, aligned one next to another, heads and tails facing the same direction. Raptor Red lowers herself carefully between her sister and one of the youngsters, gently displacing the row of chicks. They make gurking noises but don’t wake up. Raptor Red leans just a little bit against her sister’s flank, which twitches several times. Her sister growls, opens one eye so she can see what woke her up, growls again, shifts her weight around, closes her eye tight, and resumes snoring.

That’s exactly the way Raptor Red remembers her.