Kana'ōnah

Anatomy

A large, flightless, bird-like species with a short tail, long muscular legs, and clawed hands. Unlike Núreht’s other avian species, Kana’ōnah don’t have beaks, but lizard-like lips and teeth.

Kana’ōnah have arm feathers but not true wings and they are too heavy to fly, but they are able to run in excess of fifty kilometres per hour. Mainland kana’ōnah use their arm feathers to defend their young against rain and sand storms, while some island kana’ōnah hunting techniques use their wings to create shade, which attracts small fish.

A kana’ōnah’s feet and legs are featherless, with armoured scales and three forward-facing toes. In the northern subtype, the inner toe on each foot has an elongated, dagger-like claw.

Sex differences

There are striking differences in plumage between males and females in all kana’ōnah subtypes.

Females may be contrashaded in white and black (island) or camouflaged with mottled browns or greens (mainland) to aid with hunting.

The plumage of males is geared towards display with iridescent blacks and blues, neon feather edging, and expansive crests. Males of the island subtypes develop a bony crest that functions as a resonance chamber to amplify their calls.

Reproduction

Kana’ōnah are oviparous, laying a clutch of 1-3 eggs which are incubated in ground-based nests. The nests are attended to by the males, who monitor the temperature and rotate the eggs to ensure they stay at an optimal warmth. Females have little to do with incubating eggs or rearing young, but attend their mate’s needs and defend the nest.

Courtship takes place year-round, with a male composing songs for intended females and females picking males with complex or “complete” songs, weighted towards males with a successful record of breeding (who have, likely, learned good childrearing skills from their husbands) and those with living husbands and grand-husbands, who will all contribute towards caring for her offspring.

Courtship takes several years, with a paired couple creating an increasingly complex courtship song until both are satisfied. Kana’ōnah pair for life, and continue to develop their courtship song throughout their lives. Males have separate courtship songs for their wife and their husband, though they may share motifs.

The father has a specific “egg song” he sings while on the nest. This song is the foundation of speech for the chick and is the main way it identifies its father. A chick’s egg song will influence its own songs, preventing it from pairing with its own close relatives, and forms the basis of its own egg song.

Growth stages

At hatching, kana’ōnah are blind, featherless, and unable to stand. They are dependent on their parents for food, temperature regulation, and protection from predators. The chicks grow quickly, requiring them to be fed regularly, opening their eyes after a week and beginning to walk after two.

After three days, their first feathers begin to grow and the hatchling starts to become less reliant in their parents for temperature regulation. Their first plumage is downy and dark green with black mottling.

and begin to explore the space around the nest, though they are easily startled and quickly run back to their parents for shelter.

At one month old, their hunting instincts emerge and they begin to supplement their diet by catching insects and small vertebrates. At this age, they begin to follow their parents outside of the nesting area, or may be left under the protection of an adult flock-member, who can be responsible for a creche of as many as twenty chicks.

From this age, they have an extensive vocabulary of calls but do not begin to speak non-avian language until after their juvenile moult. They may stay in the nest for over two years, intermixing with a second clutch of eggs, but usually move away from the hatching-site between two and three years old, and stay with a non-brooding parent or other adult. At this stage, the chick undergoes its first moult, shedding their nestling down for their juvenile feathers. These feathers are dark green-black, though some mottling may still visible.

By ten years old, chicks are largely independent and rarely return to the hatching site. They will continue to look to the adults in their life for education and protection, but are expected to participate in ‘adult’ life to the best of their ability.

Chicks undergo their third moult around seventeen years of age, becoming an adult female, though many cultures do not expect her to begin breeding until fully settled in to her adult role. Once her supply of eggs is exhausted, at around forty years old, she undergoes a final moult and become a breeding male.

The final stage of their lifecycle, once their wife moults and takes over as a breeding male, is not a biological life stage – it is not heralded by a moult, and the male is still able to breed in the event that his husband dies or proves infertile – but is nonetheless recognised as a social transition into elderhood.

Diet

Kana’ōnah are omnivores. Their diet comprises largely of fruit, nuts, and seeds, supplemented with meat: fish, crustaceans, and turtle eggs on the islands and cavies, smaller birds, eggs, and snakes on the mainland, where they also keep domesticated livestock such as guineapigs, rabbits, and fowl, for meat.

Kana’ōnah are incapable of tasting capsaicin; their preferred cuisine is primarily sweet, sour and umami flavours.

Perception and sensory capabilities

Kana’ōnah have excellent eyesight and hearing. All kana’ōna have a secondary pair of eyes, located in front and below the main eyes, which have a filter that polarises light and removes the surface glare of water.

In addition to the supernumary eyes, kana’ōnah of the island subtype have short (2-3 cm) electro-sensitive barbels protruding from the chin, which aid in finding food in mud and shallow water. Members of the mainland subtype have magic-sensing lines of Naihe in the same location.

Symbiotic and parasitic organisms

Symptomatic host of therianthropy

Ecology

Kana’ōnah have extensively landscaped the forests and coasts of Aeho’ai to balance a healthy marine environment with industrial shallow-water fishing.

Due to the island population’s reliance on seafood, the waters around Aeho’ai are some of the cleanest and most carefully managed in the world.

Social structure

Kana’ōnah society is non-hierachical, with value placed on finding consensus and agreement. This can make them slow to react, but stable. With gardening and agriculture being sacred activities, and multi-generational being families the default, kana’ōnah tend to take a deep-time view of issues and are slow to seek revenge, preferring restitution and reparation over punishment.

Males are considered to be custodians of the past, responsible for teaching youngsters their history, while females are the architects of the future, taking an active role in shaping society. Males are not required to retire after marriage, but may feel pressure to do so.

Non-avians find kana’ōnah cultures difficult to enter, and kana’ōnah can be suspicious of strangers.

Geographic distribution

Originally from Aeho’ai, kana’ōnah have spread across that continent and Ophoné, and to almost all islands and costal settlements in northwest North Erwa and south-west Qevrun with small populations being found across the eastern shores of Xohura.

Behaviour

Kana’ōnah tend to take behavioural cues from those around them.

Lacking any major predators and with the first gardens forests established, adult kana’ōnah are fairly relaxed and spend a large amount of time playing, studying, parenting, and in creative pursuits.

Kana’ōnah decorate themselves and their nest sites more flamboyantly than other sapient avians; they are particularly attracted to the colour blue and shiny objects, with pearls and abalone shell being highly prized materials.

Singing is a hobby or habit as well as a cultural event; they often sing to themselves, composing complex melodies that capture a mood or moment.

Before the introduction of rats to the southwest islands, the only major predator kana’ōnah had were the large snakes which predate on eggs and chicks. As a result, males are alert for and aggressive towards snakes, killing them by stamping on or kicking them. This sudden aggression is instinctive and unsignaled, and can take other species unaware.

Civilization and culture

History

The main cultures of Aeho’ai trace their history back to the semi-mythological figure of Ktú the Undying. Consequently, their magic traditions are based on singing, astronomy, and herbalism. Landscaping, agriculture, and plant husbandry are considered religiously-significant pursuits.

Kana’ōnah are excellent seafarers and had spread to all of Aeho’ai and several Ophonéan islands before making contact with mammalian life. They cultivated the islands, covering them in forest-gardens that provided food year-round and eliminated snakes from the most remote islands. They did not domesticate livestock until the introduction of guinea pigs in 4.1456.

Aeho’aiwae trade goods dating from the early fourth Age and the memorialised remains of kana’ōnah have been found in north-west Iasteron, indicating early contact with the continent, though there are no signs of settlement.

Common etiquette

Kana’ōnah are not physically affectionate and physical contact is reserved for close family members. Those who socialise with more physical species – such as yutaaq – may tolerate some degree of contact for the benefit of flock harmony, but they do not seek it out.

Reciprocity is considered good for flock cohesion; kana’ōnah and alien flock-members are expected to join in with activities – but neither are activities expected to exclude due to inability. While kana’ōnah are not immune to having petty squabbles and holding grudges, maliciously ostracising an individual is a punishment, not a social dynamic.

Common culture

Where many other cultures see themselves as looking forward into the future, kana’ōnah almost universally construct a model of time that has people facing the past and moving backwards into the future. This relates to a belief that the three life stages relate to time - males being custodians of the future, females shaping the present, and juveniles, and hatchlings embedded in the past.

Interspecies relations

All-kana’ōnah communities tend to be offputting and opaque due to their reliance on body language and avian vocalisations, but larger population centres are more welcoming of incomers.

While kana’ōnah have an excellent memory for individuals, they are a strongly sexually dimorphic species and have difficulty differentiating the sexes of other, less sexually-dimorphic species.

Relationships with esaanla have been fraught in the past, due to the latter species’ similarity to snakes – the main predator of juvenile kana’ōnah – but have significantly improved through closer contact and trading links.

Kana’ōnah get along well with Núreht’s other avian species, with whom the share a great deal of body language. They can be found building interspecies sea- and river-front communities across Qevrun and Xohura.