RAPTOR RED

THE COMPUTER OF SISTERHOOD LATE MAY

Scratch, scratch, wiggle, scratch, scratch.

The Utahmptor chicks wake up scratching.

Oooomph - skunsh - SCRATCH.

Raptor Red and her sister wake up scratching too. The itchy feeling makes their spirits sag.

Both adults know what they’re scratching at.

Ticks. Tiny green and brown ticks. Ticks that thrive in the underbrush made damp by spring rains. Ticks that have a narcotic saliva so they can bore a hole with their snout straight through a raptor’s hide without the raptor knowing it. Ticks that are nearly impossible to scratch out once they have embedded themselves.

The adult Utahraptors fear ticks more than an angry herd of iguanodons, because ticks cause pain and disease and death.

Ordinarily the raptors would roll in soda mud to smother skin parasites. Back when she was growing up in Mongolia, Raptor Red followed her parents into a mud bath in a soda lake every other day in the spring. It usually worked adequately. The Mongolian ticks - most of them - would drop off after being coated in soda mud. Some would stay bored in, suck blood, drop off later on, and hatch their tick babies under a moist bush somewhere.

The native Mongolian ticks rarely debilitated their raptor hosts. These Utah ticks are different. Their borings into the skin cause nasty swelling. When the raptors scratch with their paws or rub against a rough-barked tree, the swellings get much worse. The Utahraptor’s internal defense - the immune system - seems unable to cope with the side effects of the Utah ticks.

The two raptor sisters and the three chicks walk over to the iguanodon and eat their fill. The two adults fidget and scratch and look at all the low trees nearby. They want to find a very special little animal, the only species that raptors view as a friend.

No luck. The pack wander over to the riverbank to drink. Raptor Red is much more nervous now than when she was alone. She is anxious for her sister’s chicks. Built into her mental processes is a computer that evaluates kinship. Her eyes and ears and especially her nose can detect another raptor who is close kin. Every breath she takes in company with her sister affirms their close blood bond. Her subconscious computer has a hard-and-fast rule: Take care of your own chicks first; each one is one half of yourself. Take care of your sister’s chicks next. Don’t waste time on any other blood relative.

Raptor Red has failed to bring her own chicks into the world, and so the strong hand of instinct encourages her to devote herself to her sister’s chicks. Those chicks carry a share of her own genetic individuality. Saving her sister’s chicks is saving herself.

A gentle swirl of the water’s surface betrays the presence of a four-foot-long crocodile, a Bernessartia. Too small to attack an adult raptor. But crocs are clever opportunists. As a chick, Raptor Red saw another sister disappear into a turbid Mongolian river, only to reappear minutes later in the jaws of a croc.

Raptor Red splashes out a few yards and hisses at the croc, who submerges without a sound.

The pack drinks. The chicks play, making too much noise for Raptor Red’s peace of mind. They jump on Raptor Red’s back, then jump down into the water where it is a foot deep, throwing up a muddy fountain.

The adults have had enough. Raptor Red picks up one chick gently but firmly in her jaws and carries it back onto the meadow. Her sister picks up another. The third chick instantly loses its playful courage and darts back to the rest of the family.

The crocodile lies motionless, five feet under the surface. She’s neither angry nor afraid. She thinks her slow, repetitive croc-thoughts: Wait, wait, wait, wait. She’s a perfectionist at waiting. She’s only a tenth as heavy as Raptor Red, but she’s much older - she hatched thirty-four years ago. And she’s the best croc mother in all of Utah.

Over the last twenty-two years she has successfully brooded twenty clutches of croc eggs, each with eight to twenty hatchlings. Two years were too dry to lay eggs. She’s a fiercely protective croc mom - she’s never hesitated to rush from the water, open mouthed, at any dinosaur or male croc that got too close to her progeny. This threat, accompanied by extravagant splashing, always worked.

Now there are hundreds of adult or near-adult crocs in Utah who are her children. And there is even a brood of her grandchildren. Her croc genes will take over her species in the next dozen generations. She is a gold medalist in mothering.

Crocodile motherhood depends on patience. The croc mother can wait two weeks for her next meal, because her metabolism per pound of her body weight is very low. She can stay underwater for an hour, not breathing, because she can shut down her internal metabolic furnace nearly completely. Her present wisdom comes from the slow, deliberate way the croc-race lives out its life-cycle.

She grew very slowly, learning much every year, not reaching breeding size until she was twelve. The croc-mother wasn’t rushed into adulthood the way the raptor sisters were. Their hot-blooded growth rate propelled them into sexual maturity at the age of four or five. They had to learn fast, take chances, and live in the metabolic fast lane.

So the croc mother sits and waits and waits. Her tail tip is missing, and she has long scars across her back - reminders of her youth, when she tried to ambush dinosaurs too big to drag easily into the water. She hasn’t made another such a mistake in a decade, and she never will. She’ll die slowly of old age when she passes sixty, when thousands of her offspring will have colonized every river system in North America.

When she dies, her bones will bleach to dust on a riverbank. But her multitude of progeny will spread and proliferate. Her genes will be carried in most crocodile species in the modern world.

The raptor sisters pay no attention to the croc after she submerges. For them, out of sight is out of mind. The sisters look around again for that special friend in their environment - the friend that can help them with ticks.

It’s a lazy afternoon for the pack. They lie near the iguanodon, casually feeding now and then. The chicks chase each other in and out of the cavernous rib cage. They’ve been out of the nest, big enough to explore on their own, for only a couple of days, and they get bolder all the time, expanding the distance they dare to go from their mother. There is so much fresh iguanodon meat now that their sibling competition is temporarily suspended.

Still the scratching and itching disturb Raptor Red’s mood.

Her sister squawks, stands, leans forward, and squawks again. It’s a funny sound - loud, but not threatening.

Raptor Red stands up too and squawks. The squawk is a rarely used signal. It means I’m here -1 won’t bite - I’m here.

A soft sound of feathered wings comes from the tops of some tall cycad trees. A bounding troop of sinorns, a Chinese bird species who invaded the Americas along with the raptors, flit down a few dozen feet in front of the raptor pack.

Raptor Red is beside herself with excitement. She scrunches down, laying her head and neck along the meadow floor, trying to look as meek and non-threatening as she can. But she can’t control her tail. Its stiff rear end twitches side to side. The sinorns take off immediately.

Calm - calm - CALM! she thinks to herself. She closes her eyes. She focuses inward. Her breathing slows. Her tail stops twitching.

The sinorns return - Raptor Red can hear them. They are very close. One of the birds pokes its snout up Raptor Red’s nostril.

Kah-SNEEEZE! She can’t help herself. She opens her eyes - the birds are gone again.

Calm… Calm…

She lies motionless for two minutes. Then she feels what she’s wanted all day - tiny bird feet walking up and down her back.

She winces very slightly as a red-hot spark of pain comes from just behind her shoulders. Then another. Then two at once. But after each spike of pain comes a lingering warm feeling…ixture of throbbing blood flow and relief.

The chicks watch the operation. They’ve never seen it before. A half-dozen sinorns are methodically surveying Raptor Red’s back.

Each bird stops every minute or so to reach down, carefully place its beak over a tick, and remove it with a twisting-backward head movement.

The chicks charge the birds, hissing. Raptor Red’s sister growls an authoritative rebuke. The chicks shrink back, and the birds return.

For a wonderful hour the adult raptors get groomed and plucked and bitten and deticked. The sinorns even open the edges of the tick-induced wounds, nipping off infected skin. That really hurts, but the raptors endure it. They’ve been through it before. They know that a few days in the sun will heal the wounds with hardly a trace.

Unfortunately, the chicks are too rambunctious to learn the joys of bird-grooming. When a sinorn alights on a chick’s back, the chick tries to bite it. Raptor Red’s sister has to interrupt her grooming repeatedly to snarl menacingly at her offspring.

It’s too much for a mother to bear. Raptor Red’s sister slowly rises, using smooth movements of legs and back so as not to scare the birds. She flicks out one long hand and flattens a chick to the ground.

Ghurk. The chick gets the message. It lies still. The other chicks stare, speechless. They’ve never seen their mom so angry before.

Thus the chicks learn, reluctantly, to sit still while being serviced by tick-birds. In Raptor Red’s mind, this meadow will always be associated with healing ministrations from the sinorns. Tick-Bird Meadow is a good translation of how her memory labels the locale.

Mmmmm - Raptor Red and her sister hum inaud-ibly to themselves, as if to say, This is the life - now it’s very fine. The afternoon is unusually warm and dry, with no thundershowers. The tick wounds feel much better already. All five raptors are stuffed with fresh meat. Best of all for the two adult females, the chicks' bellies are so distended with oversize portions of iguanodon that they can’t walk, so they can’t get into any mischief.

The pack stays at Tick-Bird Meadow for a couple of weeks, hunting in the early morning and late afternoon, coming back to be groomed before sundown. Raptor Red senses that, however desirable the spot seems, they’ll have to move soon. Too many other predator groups are shifting their hunting ranges. There’s great instability and unrest in the geographic boundaries claimed by raptors and by the bigger, ridge-backed meat-eaters.

It’s a young, turbulent ecosystem. The invasion of Mongolian dinosaurs, and of species from the other direction - from western Europe - has upset an ecological organization many millennia old. The new arrivals seek to establish themselves, stake out territories, protect their food resources, and raise young. But the breeding groups of old-time native species refuse to give up real estate to the invaders. So populations of native and invader are jostling each other, and predator packs are moving hundreds of miles each season, far more than they would in a normal year.

As the sun sets, coloring the dust clouds kicked up by distant herds, the adult raptors become more alert. The stream valley is so richly stocked with game that many species of predator - large, medium, and small - are being drawn in.

Late one afternoon, Raptor Red can see silhouettes of meat-eating dinosaurs far away on the horizon. Their body forms are outlined with great sharpness and clarity - as if they were paper cutouts hung in a picture window looking out on the sunset. The distant predators walk slowly, then sit down, flexing knees and ankles.

Both Raptor Red and her sister pay very close attention to how the unknown predators sit. Raptors sit upright. They have a big cushiony pad of tough skin below and behind their hips. The cushion lies directly below the huge pubic bone, longest and strongest of the hip elements. Since the cushion is oriented aft and downward, raptor torsos are held nearly erect when the raptors are relaxed in sitting position.

Only raptor species sit this way. All other predators have a built-in pubic cushion that goes straight down from in front of the hips, at a right angle to the backbone. When these nonraptors sit, they lower their torsos into horizontal position.

One by one the five distant predators sit. Each one lowers its compact torso straight down. Each one sits with its shoulders close to the ground.

The predators are too far away for the Utahraptors to judge their size directly. But shape is a clue to size.

Not our kind, the sisters think. Too big - danger. The sisters can see that the unknown predators have short thick necks and deep heavy muzzles. Those shape contours belong to ridge-backed Acrocanthosaurus, giant carnivores that are three tons full grown. Five acros are fifteen tons of unstoppable muscle, tendon, teeth, and jaws. The giant predators hardly ever travel in groups of four or more. These five are brothers from one brood who have not yet split up to find individual mates. Such bachelor packs can be unpredictable and violent.

The raptor family stays where it is, but both adults rest with eyes half open and nostrils flared. The acros don’t stir at all during the night.

Hssssssss - grhp! The raptor sisters rouse the chicks before daybreak and nudge them into movement. The wind has shifted, and the irresistible smell of the Astrodon calf that the raptors killed the day before has reached the five acros. They are getting up, stretching, making high-pitched calls to advertise their presence to any female acro who might be nearby.

Food and courtship are now conflicting calls for these acros. Two wander away, tracking the scent of a female acro. The three others start toward Tick-Bird Meadow at a fast clip.

The raptor pack leaves the meadow. It’s foolish to contest the Astrodon carcass with three acros. Besides, there isn’t much meat left on its body, and hunting should be good elsewhere in the valley.

The raptor sisters move on a couple of miles. Then they start looking for another big kill - something at least a ton. It’s much more economical than trying to feed the pack assorted lesser fry, like turtles, crocs, fish. They spot another iguanodon herd - the valley is overrun with them - and creep around to the upwind side.

Raptor Red and her sister are just getting into a superb ambush position, hidden in deep reeds by a spring, when a head pops up abruptly a few yards away and stares at them. It’s a raptor head - with a red muzzle.

Another red-muzzled raptor snout pokes up. The sisters realize that they aren’t the only pack trying to ambush the iguanodons.

There’s no noise. Neither pack wants to spook the iguanodons.

Raptor Red is confused. Her sense of smell tells her that both new raptors are young males -and not close blood kin. She doesn’t detect any new females nearby. The two males are non-threatening.

They lower their heads in a quiet head-bob-head-weave. It’s a tentative greeting and a prelude to courtship.

Raptor Red wants a new mate. Her biological urge to bond, brood, and raise chicks of her own is (becoming more insistent every day. She hasn’t forgotten her lost mate. But she feels a calling to get on with her reproductive duties - the highest calling any dinosaur can have.

One of the males advances and begins a more formal courtship dance. He’s lithe and graceful and healthy, with smooth motions and not a hint of injury or disease to mar his performance.

Raptor Red watches coyly. She’s heavier than he is, and stronger. All Red Snout females are strong enough to repulse most males. Raptor Red is programmed to make the male prove that he’s worthy, that his genes are worthy for making healthy raptor chicks with her.

The male would score a perfect 10 in difficulty from an Olympic Utahraptor judge - he manages to go through the entire courtship ritual without making any loud sounds or movements that the iguanodons could see.

This one, this male - very, very, smart. Raptor Red has been courted several times before, but never with such a bravura combination of stealth and exuberance.

She’s making up her mind to forget the hunt for today. She can kill tomorrow …

HssssSSSS. The iguanodon cows stop feeding, turn their heads, and bellow deep alarm sounds. A stampede begins.

HSSSSS. Raptor Red’s sister holds her body high, making exaggerated strides toward the males, flicking her curved handclaws in and out.

Raptor Red blinks. Her sister is making a full-fledged threat display. She wants to hurt the two males.

The older chick, who was hiding some distance away, wanders up behind its mother and tries to imitate her hissing malevolence.

The male looks surprised; his pupils dilate at the sight of the chick. He lowers his body as far as he can and starts to back away.

Now Raptor Red is pulled by conflicting instincts. She wants that male. He’s the finest male she’s ever seen - or at least the finest she can remember. She cannot join in her sister’s attack.

But she can’t leave her sister’s chicks either. Raptor Red watches as the mates withdraw. Her sister returns, still visibly agitated.

Raptor Red and her sister resume hunting late in the day and kill a plump iguanodon cow. As they sit down to eat the best parts first, Raptor Red can smell the young male nearby, hiding in a ravine. Later on, his scent gets fainter and fainter.

Her sister comes over to her and lies down. Raptor Red looks at her. She nuzzles Raptor Red and starts to groom her behind her ears, making delicate little bites.