Pirate Waxface

The Pirate Waxface split from its ancestor. It is semi-aquatic and specializes in consuming “seafaring shrews”. It has regained much of its wax; the wax is produced by glands at the base of its tusk-jaws and it spreads it over its feathers while preening, making it waterproof. A notable adaptation it has gained is the ability to rotate its tusk-jaws. It uses this ability to assist it in tearing into the nests of its prey, and in tearing their skin from their bodies to bypass their spikes. It is notable for its limited tool-use ability, where it can pull sticks or peel wood from its prey’s nest and drive it into them to hold them down while it gets to work on skinning them. It is able to accomplish this despite lacking traditionally dexterous body parts by grasping with its teeth, neck, and toes all together.

Life on the open sea isn’t exactly the best for a sauceback, especially one that broods its larvae in its tail feathers. However, the Pirate Waxface’s waxy plumage traps a lot of air, allowing it to swim without drowning its babies. Similar to its ancestor, it feeds its young fatty crop milk. While it isn’t exactly the greatest swimmer, it actually rarely swims when it doesn’t need to. When it kills a nesting seafaring shrew, it will remain on the nest and often even leave its victim’s mate and joeys alive to kill and eat later if another nest doesn’t enter its echolocation range. When a new nest to raid is in echolocation range, it is also in swimming range, and it will paddle there to begin another raid. If there is a long period of time between nest hops, however, it will start to eat the nest itself—particularly leafy parts, as well as vermees which have bored into the wood and stowaways such as Cleaner Borvermid and Stowaway Harmbless. The flora making up the nest itself isn’t easily digested, but partial decomposition has generally set in by the time it resorts to this, making it easier to digest.

The Pirate Waxface is far from unrepresented on shorelines. While the dominant subspecies live out at sea, others move between sea and coast regularly and some only live on the coast. When hunting on the coast, the Pirate Waxface will mostly kill and eat prey that are making landfall. Coast-exclusive subspecies are actually slightly smarter than the ones living out at sea, as although they have a more reliable source of food, their prey can also escape far more easily, necessitating better planning capabilities. Some coastal individuals are even capable of locating or preparing adequate weaponry to pin their prey, either finding good straight sticks on the ground or tearing strips of wood from trees and logs, long before they actually find anything to eat. They can even pass the knowledge to do so to their offspring by teaching them, similar to how a Terran wolf might teach its pups to hunt, but as it is solitary such ideas fade in and out over the generations and don’t particularly spread any more than an evolutionary trait would.

Weaned juveniles typically live on the beach as small hunters or scavengers before they are large enough to start hunting seafaring shrews.