Wood Wraith

The wood wraith split from its ancestor the needlewing and took on a nocturnal role in the environment. This allowed them to avoid diurnal predators, as well as Daytime competition. Their eyes have enlarged for greater light sensitivity. Their pupils can nearly take up the entire visible surface area of each of their eyeballs. The back of the eye holds a large reflective surface, or tapetum lucidum, which increases their light sensitivity at night.

Their standard method of hunting is poking and sifting through leaf litter and loose soil with their down-turned beaks, either nabbing food right there or feeling vibrations of prey fleeing in the leaf litter. Once captured, the food is swallowed whole. Larger prey items that are found outside of the leaf litter may be ambushed in the dark before being dispatched with a few jabs and kicks.

The skin on much of the body has become thicker and wrinkled, these excessive wrinkles are caused by the formation of a mucus environment to suspend accumulated poisons from their diet. The most notable poison is the arsenic based compound obtained from hunting poisonous chickenpear chicks. The youngest chicks have very little poison in them, while the difficult to eat larger chicks have more. This results in poison having to be collected over time, and its availability to be somewhat seasonal, which means their own concentration can fluctuate if without a source for long enough.

The wood wraith is territorial and polyandrous in habit, with multiple male territories residing within a massive female territory. Each individual is solitary within their own border, heavily competing with their respective sexes. Territorial disputes and courtship are both performed with specialized display organs derived from a melding of their pouch and front limbs. The hollow of their pouch extended under the skin into the lengths of their front limbs, which allowed an individual to appear overall larger to their opponent. The success of this spurred the elongation of the limbs and formation of inflatable sacs within them. These sacs are inflated by squeezing the pouch to force air inside up into the balloons. The tubing that allows this action remains directly under the skin as an artifact of its origin. Spotted across the surface of the display organs in the skin are clusters of blueish reflective guanine crystals. Competitive displays are highly confrontational, facing directly toward one another with ballooned limbs extended fully out from their sides, usually circling one another to size up the rival or find a weak point. Courtship displays of both sexes are more complex, involving flaring of their limbs, shaking, and bowing. The combination of the guanine crystals waving on extending limbs next to a pair of large illuminated eyes in moonlight can have a very eerie appearance to an onlooker.

That visual form of display, however, is reserved for close proximity interactions. General announcements of presence is done via their wings, which have been specialized into wooden clappers. The sound produced is similar to the musical instrument the hyoshigi. During their rounds patrolling their territory, when not hunting, they will periodically clap them together to create unique songs. These clappers are formed from lignification of the needles of the wings, which are also fused. The majority of the tissue dies and dries, with a remaining tough stand of living tissue along their outer face supporting them. The dead tissue is shed and replaced by a new batch of fused needles every three or more years.

If a confrontation is not resolved via sound or sight, by song or vivid display, then rivals will resort to violence. Their heads have a tough skin stretched across a thick and hardened skull, which they use to bash into one another. The sides of their skull have ridges that flare out to protect the more delicate tubing and front limbs from immediate assault. If head bashing continues without retreat, and one opponent gains the upper hand and flanks the other, they will attempt to claw or gouge at their enemy's sides, which can cause real damage. Most confrontations end long before this point.

As wood wraiths are a polyandrous species their breeding season is very long. A female will breed with as many males as she can hold in her territory, storing sperm from each of them for use. She will briefly gestate multiple small batches of young with this mix, then pass each batch off to a male upon meeting. The male will store the mixed young in his pouch, feeding them the majority of what he catches. During this period the male is unable to use his display sacs, otherwise, the air in his pouch will be drawn out and the cargo he was entrusted with will perish. During this time his territory will shrink as other males move into the area, they too becoming available for the reigning female.

The territory structure in this breeding system has certain trade-offs. For males having a greater range of territory within a female's territory means a larger percentage of her sperm storage will be his, more of the resulting offspring being direct from his line. However, taking up more of her territory means fewer available males to carry his offspring, other than himself. As his territory shrinks after taking on a batch of young, new males coming in means new bodies to carry his young. However, it also means the percentage of young directly from him decreased, and continues to decrease as the breeding season goes on.

For females, having as large a territory as possible means as many males to carry her young as possible. However too large and other females will be able to overlap into her territory and even possibly secure one of her males for themselves. Younger females without territory frequently do this, attempting to butt in and capture at least one mate. However, it can take some time before being accepted, with likely likelihood of acceptance becoming less and less as the breeding season goes on. A new female, or wandering female not from the area could mean that whatever offspring she's carrying, if any, aren't sired from the male of that territory and that could result in no chance of him carrying even one of his own that year. Inexperienced females possibly being ousted by the established one before she can pass his young off to him, in which case she will continue to wander and may not even find a male that year, or an invading female may just pass someone else's young off to him with any genetic contributions he makes being statistically null.

Males may be able to carry two batches of young in a breeding season, a given batch comprising of one to three chicks. The chicks will follow him for much of the remaining breeding season, learning basics on how to do things, shortly after their expulsion from the pouch the reigning female will refill it. Both sexes will reach sexual maturity after about five to six years, and are capable of surviving for up to 300 years.