Greater East-Zapolian Bickerkeef

In this sparsely vegetated region, Bickerkeefs are quite conspicuous – at least, the males are. Females are cryptically coloured with brown and grey mottling and vermiculations, and have a skulking demeanour.  The males however are very boldly coloured, as you can see in the picture.  They are quite large, standing about four feet tall, and weighing up to twenty-five pounds.  The natural predators of the bickerkeefs include scree-foxes (which are actually huge, more like wolves in size although fox-like in overall appearance and behaviour), tiger-lynxes, mountain bears, and glutterbrogs (badger-like creatures of medium size but great strength and ferocity).  Although the male bickerkeefs are very conspicuous, they, too, can often spot their enemies a good distance off over the open habitat, and can fly away to escape.  But they are sometimes caught, more frequently than the females, and thus there are few adult males compared to female.  But this suits their overall polygamous breeding system where a single male can win – and then have to defend – a large ‘harem’ of females.

But to win their harems, bickerkeef males first have to work together.  This cooperation has been going on for untold ages.  Bickerkeef males display in what might be called ‘theatres’.  The core of each theatre is a flat region amidst the slopes.  Most theatres have been in use for scores of generations and as such have been created and prepared for their purpose many centuries ago; from then they are merely maintained.  But on occasion it happens that a particular theatre can no longer be used; such has indeed happened with the disturbances caused by the Unyielding, which have not only rendered mines and villages, but also many established bickerkeef theatres in the region, no longer fit for use.  On such occasions Karan-Spalaitan ornithologists have been privileged to see how the bickerkeefs actually go about creating these theatres.

After the ruination – whether by the Unyielding or another calamity – of one theatre, ten to twenty big, male bickerkeefs will come together and form a temporary flock.  Most important is to find a suitable location for the next theatre.  They will evaluate many potential areas, for such aspects as size (most having to be at least fifty yards in diameter), flatness, how easily predators can approach it or hide in the environs, number of territories of female bickerkeefs in the immediate environment, proximity to the territories of other male bickerkeefs, and factors we probably still don’t understand well.  But after the location is finally chosen – to the satisfaction of all the males in the flock – they will go to the next step, preparing the theatre. 

The first item is that the flat, open area be prepared for excellent viewing.  The bickerkeefs crop the vegetation … every tall bush that would obstruct the view is cropped down to just a few inches, the males all working together snipping at the tough leaves and twigs with their powerful bills.  They will roll away stones and boulders from the centre of the theatre towards its circumference, pushing them with their chests, and scrape the soil with their strong feet, all to make the theatre ‘floor’ flat and even.

The stones and boulders they roll from the centre to the perimeter will form a raised ring around the theatre floor – but for the bickerkeefs this is not enough.  They will now in fact roll additional round boulders – as large as they can move, which in some cases are surprisingly large –  from the higher slopes to their ‘theatre’, adding them to the other stones and boulders around the edge.  These are the seats for the spectators, and a typical fifty-by-fifty-yard ‘theatre’ will have sixty to eighty of them around the perimeter.

At the same time the males also gather food supplies, mostly seeds, nuts and bulbs, that won’t perish quickly but last a few days.  These they stack in piles just inside the boulder perimeter.

Once satisfied with the theatre, the males will announce it to the world!  Each male will perch on a boulder ‘seat’, facing outwards, and call, all of them together raising an immense ruckus which will echo around the surrounding cliffs.  These particular calls sound like tremulous, falsetto screams going up and down the scale.  To boost the volume the male bickerkeef inflates his gular pouch – the orange-red sack of skin on his throat.   Calling is done every morning; one by one females in the vicinity will arrive.  First come will pick the best ‘seats’ – the tallest boulders with the biggest piles of food stacked in front of them.  The males will allow them to eat this food so they don’t need to leave the theatre to gather their own; there’s enough to ensure that they won’t starve.  Over several days more females will arrive.  The males at this stage also bear the burden of defending them, but ten to twenty large bickerkeef males can drive off any potential predator.

When the males are finally satisfied that they’ve satisfactorily announced their performance and all the females in the vicinity have arrived – this is usually after four to seven days – they will at last start the performance itself.  All the females will be looking towards the centre – the arena one might call it – where the males will now compete against each other after having cooperated up till now!

The first item is pom-pom waggling!  As you can see the male has a big ball of fluffy hair-like feathers jutting out over the front of its bill.  All the males gather at the centre, facing outwards to the female.  He crouches down and curves his neck backward over his back, lifting his head so the pom-pom is raised high, and then puffs it out as much as possible.  Then he rapidly bobs his head up and down or shakes it from side to side, all of which sets the pom-pom waggling!  The aim seems to be to make the pom-pom waggle and bounce in such a way that it seems to be independent of its owner’s actual head!  At the same time the males make bubbling, gobbling sounds.

The females bounce up and down in their seats and make clucking noises at this glorious display.  The ones who sit opposite the most impressive male will cluck the most excitedly, and other females at this point might leave their own seats and make their way to this area, even when having to exchange their own seats for inferior ones.  But the choice is not yet made.

The next item is wattle-flailing!  The male bickerkeef has two long, bluish-green wattles dangling beside his bill.  While already long, in preparation for this item the bickerkeefs extend them even more, by pumping blood into them, doubling their lengths or more.  Now the bickerkeef males step away from each other to make room for what comes next!   Once everyone is in position, they start singing – this time a quite different call, like a staccato barking – and while uttering it the male sways his head from side to side, with a much more vigorous motion than during the pom-pom waggling, which makes his long wattles swing and flap and flail around wildly!  Again the females bounce and cluck; again they regroup themselves, females facing less-impressive flailers leaving their positions to group towards the most impressive ones.

After this the last item of the performance arrives: feather fluffing!  Now the males curve their necks forward and downward, pressing their heads to their lower chests.  They raise the crests on the back of their heads – while opening them up they shake their heads from side to side so the crests spread out sideways as well – into huge feathery fans.  These now quite overshadow the pompoms – indeed they obscure the entire head of the bird.  He will also raise the feathers of his back and rump – these, already voluminous and fluffy-looking in a male bickerkeef at rest, now expand even more, so the entire body of the bird looks like a giant fluffball.  The wings are spread outward, their coverts raised as well, and the tail is fanned and raised high over the body.  The entire bird at this stage looks like an enormous pile of fluffed feathers.  To top it off, each male will make loud popping noises while bouncing up and down – not using his wings, but using his strong legs to leap straight up as high as possible.

Again the females will evaluate the performance, judging the males on the size of the fluffballs they become as well as how high they leap and the loudness of their popping calls.  Again they will regroup to face the most accomplished feather fluffer.

 
This being the final event, the females will have regrouped now based on all three performances and the majority of them will now be facing the male who did the best all-round!  The whole performance will have lasted several hours and the males are quite exhausted at this point.  Now what is interesting is that although the winner will now win access to the majority of the females, the others don’t get nothing!  At least some females will attach themselves to the lesser performers and strangely enough there will be a spike of interest in the ones who performed the worst, the losers as it might seem!  Actually they aren’t exactly losers but they perform wrong, not according to the standards – or the stereotypes – used by the winners.  What this demonstrates is that there is in fact some attraction to novelty for its own sake, and that males not as impressively ‘endowed’ as others can exploit this.  While currently in the Greater East-Zapolian Bickerkeef, performance standards are still fixed and there is little variation, conceivably in time sub-groups, one might even call them sub-cultures, might form in which the different styles of performance actually become the expected standards.  Similar selection standards operate in other bickerkeefs, there always being a small subset of females that will reward males with divergent performances, but then these can end up showcasing different physical attributes of the males, resulting in these getting selected and becoming more frequent in those populations.  It is thought that this selection of ‘wrongness’ or ‘differentness’ in subsets of Bickerkeef females is responsible for driving the differentiation and speciation that has resulted in the existence of so many different kinds of Bickerkeefs in the Lands of Youth. 

All the same, Valerie herself often wondered if some females don’t deliberately choose the worst performers out of pity!  It might seem an act of ascribing human characteristics to animals … but in such a magical world, why would that be strange?  Valerie spoke of it with Kelliwynn, who, not knowing bickerkeefs that well, couldn’t give a definite answer but who affirmed that birds can indeed have complex emotions, attitudes and motives.

For whatever their reasons may be, at the end the females will have picked their favourites.  The winners might end up with ten to twenty females; the losers with four or five; those in between with one, two, or none.  The males will then abandon the theatre, staking out territories in the environs based on the size of their harems.  Each male will keep his for many years … the next performance will only happen in twelve to fifteen years, at which point the females can choose new mates.  (Bickerkeefs are long-lived, females living to seventy or eighty, and males usually to forty or fifty.)  The abandoned theatre might deteriorate, new shrubs growing in the arena, or the boulders getting shoved out of position by mountain sheep, goats or pigs, but the males will make the minor repairs in time for the next show.  Each male will father children with each of his females over the ensuing years … the number of eggs each female lays per year depends on the rainfall and availability of food each year, and can vary from one to eight.  All the females lay their eggs in a single nest, which the male defends while they go out to forage; when the chicks hatch, they are immediately able to seek their own food, and can fly within six to seven days.  They accompany the females in the ‘harem’ flock until they are sexually mature, at which point the male chicks leave to join or form bachelor flocks.  The females remain with their mothers until the time of the next performance, when they might leave, if they so choose, to join with their chosen mate.

The Greater East-Zapolian Bickerkeef has good relations with humans.  The Blirad Valley is sparsely settled, only some mining villages existing here and there throughout it.  Miners enjoy seeing the bickerkeefs and don’t disturb them.  Only bickerkeef species of the moister valleys and plateaus sometimes find themselves in competition with domestic animals kept by people, most especially the giant Karan-Spalaitan horses.  The meadows that are suited for bickerkeef displays are also used by the horses for grazing.  But since the Karan-Spalaitans are well-disposed towards the bickerkeefs, they have set aside significant regions as mating grounds, and will corral their horses away from these during the years when the bickerkeefs chose their mates.

Valerie of course often wonders as to how the animals, plants and all living things of the Lands of Youth are related to those from our world.  She would, based on her knowledge of her home world, want to call bickerkeefs some kind of pheasant, since in all respects they are much like them.  But the question cannot really be settled if she doesn’t have enough of an understanding of exactly how this new world relates to her own (and ours), and how it works.  She is not even sure if the animals (and people!) she finds here have such a thing as DNA or some equivalent of it, or exactly how their bodies and minds function at a basic level.  You could perhaps understand how eager she is to study all the new life that she’s encountering … and how frustrated she can get that most of her time must be spent on actually completing her quests instead of allowing her to freely explore and observe!