Chatterer

The **chatterer** (*Laruserinus sapiens*), also known as the **sparrowgull**, is a species of small magpie-like perching bird with a green, black and white plumage and a somewhat gull-like head, hence its name. The chatterer originally did not exist, but has since been created by SciiFii and introduced across the world except the Arctic or Antarctica. It belongs to a widespread subfamily Carduelinae, despite one of its common names. The chatterers utilize an exceptionally wide array of vocalizations to communicate different things with each other and their offspring, such as food sources and different varieties of predators. They care for their young for a very long period for birds their size, up to a full year, during which time the parents don't usually breed again, and their chicks learn much from their parents, not only how to find food and avoid predators but also how to talk; understandings of different calls and how to produce them is not innate, but by the time they fledge, they will have picked up their parents' complex vocabulary and will in turn teach them to their own young. The chatterers are social and form monogamous pair bonds retained year to year. Males and females hold territories together throughout the breeding season and are identical in size and appearance. When the young hatch all four forage to provide for the first brood of nestlings and then continue to feed them when they leave the nest. To find food, chatterers are versatile foragers. They are mostly carnivorous, though will eat some seeds and fruit if it can be located. Their harsh, seasonally changing environment has required the development of especially good problem-solving skills versus their relatives in more stable environments and they have become extremely adaptable tool-makers and users. They find insects hidden in wood by stripping off the bark of trees and utilizing thorns or sharpened twigs to probe the holes made by wood-boring beetle larva in order to fish them out. Adults teach their young how to break the eggs of ground-dwelling birds by cooperatively hammering them with rocks which would be too large to handle singly, as well as how to kill dangerous stinging insects with weapons from a distance - using sharpened sticks or crushing them under stones, to render them safe for consumption. Chatterers are able to utilize sharp stone chips as axes or knives. Initially selecting the sharpest naturally-occurring stone chips they could find, some then learn to chip stones themselves, including flint, to produce the sharpest edges possible for butchering prey. They do this by holding other, harder stones in one foot, and hammering them against already thin flint chips to produce small, sharp cutting implements one to two inches long that can easily be carried around with them. The process caught on culturally, and now most chatterers know how to knap flint to create cutting tools, which they hold in their beaks and cherish as prized possessions. They also prey on other birds and small desert-dwelling mammals by chasing them into an ambush, or by imitating the distress calls of their offspring and then killing them as they come near to find the source of the sound. Where possible, they also routinely harass other animals to pirate their food, mimicking the alarm calls of other birds and shrieking them when they see one has something they want, so that the other bird takes panic and drops its prize or aggressively harassing larger predators while other group members quickly gather as much of the carcass as they can bring back to the group. They preserve all types of food by drying them - easy in the desert sun. Insects and whole small animals are skewered on thorns, while larger kills are butchered and the meat dehydrated in thin strips. Such larders, stocked in the rainy season, are then relied upon throughout leaner times. The chatterers teach their young all of their skills, both hunting and in food preservation - none of them are innate, and thus different populations utilize different methods of feeding. Some are skilled spearers but have no knives, others have specialized mostly to catch insects, and a few are truly generalist, able to make a tool suited to obtaining nearly any potential food source. The young begin mostly clueless as to how to make or use tools but become competent very quickly. The parents demonstrate to their young how to craft and utilize different tools, and the chicks mimic the adults actions and try to fish out insects or break open eggs from a very young age. Though their coordination is initially poor, they begin to develop these skills competently by four months of age. By six months, fledgelings begin proficiently hunting, and they are effectively mature - able to do everything their elders can - in only a year. Purely going by its physical appearance, there would be no way you could determine that the little and seemingly plain chatterer is such a big thinker. Its brain to body ratio is not dramatically larger relative to its body size than that of the other similarly-sized birds (though it's notable that it is higher than many other similarly-sized living bird, with a raven-sized brain in a jay's body), but it is especially efficient, making the absolute most of the available space while not making the brain so large that flying ability is hampered - a further continuation of the trend observed in closely related passerine birds, which being constrained by the need to be light enough to fly differ from ground-based mammals in normally developing increasingly efficient, rather than simply larger, brains. In the chatterer, this process of streamlining has allowed it a similar mental capacity to humans, with a brain weighing only 14 grams - literally one percent the weight of the human brain, which weighs about three pounds, or 1,400 grams. However, it must also be noted that the body of human being is also hundreds of times larger than that of a chatterer. The chatterer is not only highly intelligent in regards to problem solving and crafting tools to find food, but it is also demonstrably self-aware. The chatterer have not only a wide repertoire of distinct calls used to communicate resources and threats, but have developed a proper complex language in order to most effectively communicate complicated ideas between individuals quickly. The instruction of this begins when the young are just hours old. In the nest, every newborn chick is given a distinct name in the form of a distinct sequence of syllables which is not used except when providing food to the particular chick to whom it has been given, so that by the time it leaves the nest it recognizes this name and responds excitedly when it is called upon in anticipation of food. It will keep this name throughout life. All of the chicks also learn the names of their parents and helpers, as each one repeats its own name before that of the chick it is feeding so that the chicks, once fledged, can immediately be expected to be able to distinguish between its caretakers. All of this knowledge is taken in by the chick even before it can see, let alone communicate back, and by the time the young is three weeks old it can easily distinguish each adult by its voice, put the right name to each face, and most importantly respond when called. The chatterer has a wide array of language, cultures, religions, technologies, etc similarly to humans. The conservation status of the chatterer is **Least Concern** due to successful conservation efforts, the chatterer's wide range and its tolerance to many of the human activities, allowing it to be able to work and live with humans and other sapient species.