Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

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.