Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom

The Counter(re)productive Habits Of The Kaimanawian Flightless Parrot 'Kākāpō'

That was the title of a journal article, because the expert had in fact sent her first publication ahead.

That was the title.

Twilight had said something once: that the two scariest things in a lecture were a scholar trying to be funny -- and having that party succeed. Because to have a subject be so inherently soaked with insanity as to prevent the zero-humidity environment of academia from drying it out...

Counter(re)productive

The base text didn't fully neutralize the acidity of the nonsense.

It did, however, suggest some of the lines had been crafted as careful understatements.

Define 'life'.

That particular issue can get very complicated. But we don't need more than the basics here. Let's say... we're looking for something which needs to survive. A rock doesn't. You can change the environment to the point where stone can't exist in its current state, but your average boulder has no need to eat and no matter what Maud might say, isn't particularly worried about the weather conditions. Rocks simply go on. To be a living being means your existence likely requires the ongoing acquisition of resources. Something to metabolize, at the very least.

Survival. Maintain that fragile existence. Find fuel. Push that personal engine, keep it running. And when your own parts start to wear out... make sure you can create something which takes over for you. A next generation.

Because survival, in the evolutionary sense, is about the long-term strategy. We're looking at doing whatever is necessary to ensure the continued existence of the species. Individuals are mainly important because you need a bunch of those to make the kind of number which provides a degree of safety.

You can lose a few. In fact, for any species which is supposed to be experiencing natural death, you'd better lose some on a regular basis or you're going to have more problems. This tends to start with 'these things are still reproducing, and has anypony noticed that the one plant they eat is gone?'

You can't lose them all, because that's extinction. But from the survival standpoint, having too many is its own problem.

Consider the kākāpō. You'll have to do all of the work on that one, because this is a bird which is not capable of considering itself.

It's currently native to a very few islands in the southern hemisphere, all off the coast of Kaimanawa and yes, multiple ones. How did a flightless bird settle onto more than one habitat, when those locations are divided by sea? Nopony's quite sure. The experts are still looking for most of the fossils, and you can't find one just because you want to -- well, unless you have exactly the right mark, and those ponies are kind of in high demand. But it's possible that at some point in the distant past, the kākāpō could fly.

(Or there might have been one island, and then something very powerful became extremely angry in a defined area. That sort of thing happens in a world of magic, although it's fairly rare to still have parrots around after.)

Take a look at Kaimanawa itself. There's a decent spread of predators to go with their trying-not-to-become-meals, and it's a place which has its share of magic and monsters and all the mayhem you could ask for, only in a language which gets very hard to pronounce. And you apparently have to understand something about tattoos to go there. (Ponies don't really use tattoos. Using ink to make a picture means shaving away fur so others can see it and besides, the mark is obviously superior.) But it's an absolutely lovely country. Incredible views from the mountains, and the forests are just so green...

With touches of yellow.

On the mainland, a flightless kākāpō's main threat would come from hunting birds and so the behavior response is simple: if something passes over you, freeze. The feathers readily blend into the jungle. A sleeping kākāpō, nearly motionless within the green, can be almost impossible for a harrier to spot. And if they're awake -- those legs have power. The parrot can no longer fly, but it can still outrun quite a few threats. Give it a second of warning, a clear shot at the nearest shielding bush --

-- on the mainland, in what was likely their original environment, life would have been a struggle. That's normal. Very few species get to coast on merit. And perhaps in time, as new predators rose, the parrot would have fallen. Become lost before ponies ever found it.

On the mainland -- and the expert, based on old drawings and feather-bearing artifacts, knows the kākāpō was there once -- the bird was lost. There are no living ones left.

But somehow, the species reached the islands. (Maybe it caught a ride. Or there was a huge magical battle and a lot of random teleports got involved.)

There are no harriers flying over the islands.
No eagles.
There are, however, plenty of places to hide, lots of shelter, endless low branches to climb, and all the rimu trees which a starting population could ask for.

For a period of what was at least several centuries -- possibly millennia, and maybe for a lot longer than that -- there was nothing living on those islands which represents any threat to a kākāpō. Not a single living animal which was capable of killing them. There was nothing to thin the numbers down.

And the bird had no competition.

Was it evolution? It depends on whom you ask. There may be a certain 'use it or lose it' aspect for species traits on a generational scale: none of your ancestors could be bothered with flying, so now you're grounded. Or perhaps there was a single higher power responsible for the creation of the parrot, but it had just gone through thousands of butterflies earlier in the day and was clearly wiped out. Everyone makes mistakes when they're tired.

So creation, or evolution, or Discord on a day where he'd been really bored and so was absolutely never going to tell her about it, had looked down upon the wonder of life known as the kākāpō. And upon doing so, the determining force behind the existence of precious Life in a cold universe had said "Oh. No natural predators here."

This would have been followed by a very long pause.

"...horse apples."

Because the bird was stupid.

Admittedly, you needed to have sapient-level intelligence in order to see some of the problems coming, and Fluttershy knew there were ponies who weren't capable of working it out. But it was ultimately all about resources. There were rimu trees on the islands. (They bore fruit frequently, and the kākāpō reproductive cycle kicked in when the production was highest -- every two to four years.) Lots of plants. Plenty of food for a purely herbivorous avian. It would have no trouble at all in eating and staying healthy.

Well-fed, healthy animals tended to reproduce.

Subsequent generations would keep it up. After all, they were safe.

They were also utterly incapable of some pretty fundamental actions.

Like counting.

Or comparing ratios.

'Kākāpō to rimu trees': that was a pretty important one. Especially since it would have been on the generational decrease.

Followed by a plummet.

And a crash.

The parrots, with nothing remaining which could hunt them, left to their own devices and with no capacity for thinking about the problem -- would have eventually produced enough chicks to strip the plants bare. To eat everything on the islands, until there was nothing left within flightless reach. And the last of the kākāpō... flightless birds who could only climb so far would stare up at unreachable green canopies, helplessly flap useless wings... and starve.

Or rather, that was what would have happened to a species which, when the time came to have sex, would just saunter over to a potential partner and say "Your place or mine?"

Kākāpō weren't at risk of extinction because of their reproductive process: that was something which had only come about because of... sapience. Those who could think had thought about exploring, and had been a little too slow to spot the full consequences of their actions. They were trying to make up for it, because sapience was about taking responsibility.

But survival was about the long-term strategy.

Kākāpō were incredibly stupid.

If you're going to consider the flightless parrots of the far south... then try to see them as the feathered, fully-accurate incarnation of the adolescent pony male's worst fear.

Namely, that the entire world is in fact directly and purposefully designed to keep him from getting some.

For the kākāpō, that's exactly the case.

Because as a species, until the thinkers had arrived... the parrots had been exactly stupid enough to live.

VHNOOOOOM

That's a bass noise, and pinning down exactly where it rests on the sound spectrum is crucial -- because the secret of bass is that you can't pin it down.

Not for the creating source.

Ask anypony who's ever had to set up the sound reproduction system for a cinema: the treble bar's placement needs to be determined by the sort of arcane formulas which are half-math, half-mark -- but the speakers for the bass? Kick those anywhere. All you need is raw power, and the sound will fill the space. The best way to determine where bass sound is coming from is through being right next to it. At least then, all of the fur ripples are trying to flee a central source.

Let's take a look at the soil bowl. When viewed in terms of evolution trying for a flourish or a creating party looking for applause, it's going to come up short either way -- initially. Because the parrot has, through the mechanism of non-thought, dug out a depression which amplifies the sound he's making -- while simultaneously putting in some extra work on distorting the fine edges. Then consider that the bird likes to set up the bowl near a boulder. Why? Because he couldn't find a cliff face. The islands of his home are volcanic remnants: high vaults of stone, rich soil. The best spots for males to boom is right next to the stone mountains, because that rock is going to do its part for the sound and besides, that's where instinct said to go. A boulder is being used at the cottage because when it comes to local mountains, Canterlot's a fairly long way off.

Also, we just had some plurals there. 'Males'. 'Spots'. Because in the kākāpō's home? Heat season is determined by the fruit production of the rimu tree. And that means all of the boys are heading to the breeding yard. At the same time.

Because that's the nature of 'lek mating'. A given parrot tom is in active, open, and ultimately (rather) vocal competition with every other bird. If their starting positions are fairly close to each other, you'll get territorial displays of strength: failure to back off by at least one party may lead to a fight over the best spots. This isn't likely, because kākāpō are fairly solitary birds: the young play together and the adults can make friends, but their individual habitats can have a lot of separation: in particular, females may live a third-gallop away from the males.

But on this night, all of the breeding-age toms will be sounding off. They're all trying to put on a show, in direct competition with each other: something halfway between a display of prowess and a mating ritual. They make their sound. All of them, hour after hour, as sonic bursts of twinned, utterly pure Bass and Horny echo into the island night. Because somehow, nature has decided that the single best way for the males to prove themselves to the local girls as the winners -- as the single best possible worthwhile contributors to the next generation -- is through being REALLY, REALLY LOUD.

The boys sit low in their bowls and VHNOOOOOM all night long. Because the girl of their dreams will track down the best parrot. And then there will be sex.

That's what the tom parrots are doing.
This is what it's like from the hen end.

There is a tremendous racket coming at you from all directions and none, at the same time. It's disorienting -- no, it's worse than that. It's sonics as body blows: you don't take a step, you just get knocked in a given direction by the next burst. And none of this can be tracked, because bass masks its own origin point -- and there's more than one of those things, but good luck stumbling across a specific site as the waves overlap and interfere.

As a hen, you're at least somewhat interested in sex, because this is about the rimu fruit as much as anything else and all of the parrots are eating the same thing. But every time you try to locate a male, all you get is this horrible rock-bounced, bowl-distorted, cliff-warped ruckus.

The entire island night is screaming in a single voice which comes from a thousand throats, and it has a question.

WANNA FUUUUUUUUCK?

Strictly and sexually speaking, anything which thinks this noise is a good idea needs to be left alone. Forever.

But instinct calls, and it means the hen kākāpō has her own response to that.

WOULD ONE OF YOU MOON-DAMNED MORONS MIND TELLING ME JUST WHERE, EXACTLY, YOU ACTUALLY ARE? OR, OPTIONALLY, COULD ALL BUT ONE OF YOU SHUT UP FOR A MINUTE SO I CAN TRY TO NARROW IT DOWN A LITTLE?

To which the males, who cannot truly think, have a single reply.

WANNA FUUUUUUUUCK?

This is, in terms of useful information provided, somewhat unhelpful.

Pony studies on the kākāpō condition were just beginning, and so just about every number in the initial articles was openly labeled as an educated estimate -- but the expert was writing from observation added to intuition and mark.

It was the sonics. The females couldn't track them. (Ponies with marks for acoustics and sound design were being sent recordings in the hopes that they would be able to narrow the living source of the reproductions down to a single square gallop.) The males couldn't be taught to do anything else, because mating behavior wasn't exactly learned. And when it came to the hens...

The males made their bowls during heat season. And the females wanted to lay eggs -- but the expert had some early suspicions which suggested the hens responded to that kind of horrible noise in the same manner as everything else: Trying To Get Away. It was just that... they couldn't track the sources. And if you didn't know which direction to run towards, then you also didn't know where to run away. Ultimately, the two would become confused.

Technically speaking, it was possible that no male kākāpō ever actually won his fair lady. Instead, a battered hen, tossed about the island by the random battering of decibels, will randomly stumble into the lucky bowl.

The male, upon seeing an Actual Girl, does the following: rocks from side to side, makes clicking sounds with his beak, and then gets up. Once he's standing, he'll turn his back to the hen, spread his wings as a display, and -- try to walk backwards towards her. This last will be repeated for nearly an hour, until sex takes place or the hen leaves.

That's what the tom does. There's some question as to whether he's doing it because he's identified a female's presence in the bowl or if he'd put on the same display if a mouse wandered by -- the expert has some questions on the parrot's ability to reliably ID his own species, and isn't going into details -- but he's certainly doing all of that.

Very much to the point: he does all of this instead of continuing to try for more night hours of VHNOOOOOM. Suddenly, the endless sonic confusion being produced by the screaming darkness has a single spot of relative safety, which is occupied by the one person who isn't currently yelling at you.

The intercourse arises from instinct. The demands of the blood. And if the females are the slightest bit more intelligent than the males, it might also be Thank You For Shutting Up.

(In terms of recent pony history, this was similar to the period immediately following the invention of the gramophone -- because that had rapidly led into The Discovery Of The Pony Who Plays Their Entire Collection At Top Volume Around Two In The Morning. (And liked the high-impact sounds of yak music. A lot.) Entire communities had Discovered their own version of that pony, then spontaneously came together to do something about it. Sex-based celebrations of silencing success could be presumed in nearly every case, excepting those where monsters had invaded the town, smashed the offending residence into two-dimensionality, and then wandered off to get some sleep.)

There was another possible reason for sexual interaction to arise, and the expert mentioned it -- then dismissed her own thought, as that kind of rationale was the sort of thing sapients did. Still, there are females of every thinking species whose stated reason for not wanting to have sex is because they have a headache. It's questionable as to whether the hen kākāpō have ever indulged while in any other state.

And then there will be chicks. Or at least, there will be eggs, because females wander back to their own territory and set up the nest by themselves.

A successful male, who doesn't have the brains to question his luck, will respond to his improbable triumph through remaining in the bowl and making more sound.

Who knew? They might get lucky twice! And wasn't that what was really important?

In the professional opinion of the expert, approximately ninety percent of all bowl-based lek mating rituals failed. Anything which worked out could be presumed to have done so by pure accident. It was a breeding system with slightly better odds than a roulette wheel, and a much darker sense of humor.

And that was why the kākāpō, as a species, had survived.

Because their environment was too safe. There was nothing hunting them. The volcanoes which had formed the islands had gone dormant, and the natural weather of the region tended towards the anti-dramatic: you couldn't even ask hazardous conditions to bring the numbers down. Subtract accidents, the rare disease, and kākāpō in the time before discovery had basically lived until they died from old age.

Give a species which lived in safety the ability to reproduce at will, with efficiency, and they would outbreed their food supply.

Extinction.

And so the kākāpō had been gifted -- truly gifted -- with a joke. Something which meant you mostly got new chicks on sheer luck. And because the attempts failed so often, there were just enough of the flightless parrots around to breed and blunder and try to do it all again in the next generation, because survival required a long-term strategy which worked and for the kākāpō, total sexual idiocy was ultimately protective. A species of nearly fearless innocents living in perfect safety, because the intelligence needed for anything more normal would have been -- counter(re)productive.

Prey responses? What was going to threaten them? Sapient creatures hadn't come to that part of the world immediately and when they'd first done so -- it had been mating season. They'd heard the bass long before getting close enough to spot a source. And when a thinking being heard that kind of racket, it tended to have thoughts along the lines of I Should Probably Leave That Alone.

The kākāpō had wound up producing an accidental defense mechanism. It had taken generations before anyone had approached the Screaming Islands.

Then they'd discovered the source was -- harmless.

(But disruptive.)

And they would have left it be -- but ponies, and the other sapient species, seldom traveled alone. Especially when using ships.

The kākāpō had been on islands. The first major approach had been by boats. And you got rats on boats: those wanted to eat the eggs. And you got cats to keep the rats down, but nothing was as easy for the disembarked cats to hunt as a kākāpō and not all felines were as sporting about it as the cottage ones. The silly parrots couldn't recognize a predator when they were being pounced on by one...

A rapidly-dropping bird population suddenly needed a reproductive strategy which operated with rather more speed and efficiency. But evolution didn't work that way, and any direct creator was presumably still sleeping off their post-beetle exhaustion. (The world had a lot of beetles.) The kākāpō couldn't ask their blood to help them, and they couldn't save themselves.

And thus the conservation efforts. Those who could think had thought about the consequences which had arisen from exploration, and were trying to help those whom they'd never meant to harm. Currently, that required removal of all invasive animal species from the islands -- while evacuating the kākāpō to safety, until their home was truly theirs again. Protection, caring -- and, at the very end of the copied article, something about an upcoming, undescribed development called a 'trust hat'. Or at least, that was what Fluttershy thought it said. Spike had been laughing a little too hard at that point, and the words were barely legible.

But ponies had to help. That was the responsibility. Because they hadn't meant to change things... but they had.

And as the expert noted, due to the fallout from exploration of the island...

The mare who'd written the article didn't believe it was what had actually been happening. She'd said so, directly, and Spike had presumably cupped a hand to hide the next precisely-copied words from Twilight, along with refusing to tell his sibling what all the giggles were about.

But in the expert's opinion, ponies had to get involved.

It was no longer possible for an entire species to survive on pity fucks.