Yep, ANOTHER Skryke revison.
A noteworthy adjustment is that I changed the face and leg coloration from orange to a bluish grey color and made the eyes dark this time around. I think the dark eyes give them a more menacing appearence.
The skryke's coloration is meant to appear somewhat gamebird-ish, which I felt made sense given the skryke's mostly ground-based existence.
I tint the backgrounds on all my drawings now because I find it actually makes the drawing itself stick out better for some reason, I rather predictably went with the red because of course...it is a rather violent, warlike color.
For now I've copied and pasted the same species description that I've used in my other versions but I think the time has come for me to sit down and type out a more complete and better written natural history of Sopholestes ferox. So that should be forthcoming in the near future.

Also thanks to Tomozaurus [link] who provided feedback and assistance in the form of visual aids to help me in making some adjustments to the wing.

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"I used to warn the uninitiated that skrykes hit hard on the attack, much harder then their svelte build and light weight would suggest possible. Sheer velocity is their first weapon, They come at you fast, rapidly appearing out of nowhere. Exploding from cover then springing high to fell their opponent with a flurry of rapid raking kicks to the stomach and groin. Taloned wings dig into the shoulders or hold the unfortunate soul's head in position so that the jaws can savage the face and throat. Several would attack a patrol at once, each selecting a different target, mauling them, then leaping to another, attempting to cripple as many in quick succession as they could. They would get right in amongst us, unpredictable whirlwinds of teeth and claws. Those of us able to shoot often wouldn't for fear of hitting our comrades. And then as if on cue the skrykes would vanish into the bush as suddenly as they appeared. The assaults lasted only a matter of seconds but they always left carnage behind them. The men I knew who survived such encounters were all horribly disfigured, blinded, faces mangled, castrated, ghoulish testaments to the ferocity of an enemy who was losing the war, but refused to lose quietly. "

---Damien Marcks, a veteran of the government's anti-skryke campaign


The island's "other" intellect. The name i gave them to serve as the common human term for the species is "skryke" which I later found out happened to also be an Old Norse word for "shriek" which described the vocalizations I had in mind for these things quite well. So I guess that was a happy accident.

Thier language is a mix of birdlike squawks warbles etc... along with the chracteristic screeching locater call used by members of hunting parties to indicate position to one another.
They are secondarily flightless, being descended from a flying Jeholornis type ancestor but re-evolved into a ground predator after colonizing the island . They are sentient, but their taloned, stiff fingered hands are still geared toward prey manipulation and climbing (young skrykes have proportionally longer arms then adults and are partially arboreal, though even adults climb trees fairly well). Therefore tool use is virtually non existent due to a lack of evolutionary pressure to develop this ability. This of course puts them at a disadvantage against the human settlers to the island, whose mastery of tool use gave them the upper hand. Socially they are sort of a cross between stone-age humans and hyenas. Society is matriarchal and like spotted hyenas the offspring of the alpha female automatically share their mother's high status. hereditary rule is somewhat common, however coup d'etats where a ruling "family" is suddenly and violently overthrown are known to occur on occasion. Females in general are dominant due to larger average size. Mating is at the female's discretion and she typically chooses a male that impresses her somehow (generally through hunting or fighting prowess). Though a female may have a "favorite" male consort with whom she consistently associates and chooses as a mate for more then one breeding season skrykes are not monogamous in the literal sense. The status of males unrelated to the matriarchal line is partially dependent on the status of the female they consort with (thus a male who is favored by the clan matriarch enjoys greatly elevated status, especially if he has fathered chicks with her). In general male skrykes tend to be shorter-lived and more nomadic then females as well, young males often strike out on their own and join other clans.
Skrykes are known to engage in clan "warfare" amongst themselves (with cannibalistic infanticide commonly used as a terror tactic against rival clans. killing and eating the enemy's offspring was a tactic extended to humans as well)
They have follow a "religion" of sorts centering around the "Sky Matriarch". Skrykes believe that when they die they they will join the Sky Matriarch in soaring over the earth for eternity. The religion speaks to the Skryke fascination with flight (due to being descended from a flying creature). Birds are viewed as divine kinfolk and treated with reverence and believed to be messengers from the Sky Matriarch. . Skrykes are skilled mimics, they imitate the sounds of their prey to confuse or lure it, and some are able to develop limited proficiency in human speech. Small prey is generally easily dispatched with the jaws (usually with a quick bite/shake maneuver), or killed with a "death squeeze" by the large clawed hands during which they grip the prey and contract, driving the claws into the prey's body (similar to how hawks kill prey with their feet) larger animals require group hunting and are driven into traps or run to exhaustion by relay teams of hunters. A skryke on it's own is essentially limited to small game hunting.
Following the uneasy truce between the skrykes and the human colonists some skrykes have taken to maintaining goat or sheep herds as a readily avaliable source of food. They aquire the animals by trading with human settlers. Settlers can provide local skryke clans with livestock in exchange for permission to access rich mining areas inside the clan's territory without fear of attack. The human fascination with gems and precious metals baffles the skrykes, who have no use for such things, thus they are more then willing to trade a few shiny rocks for something edible like a flock of sheep.

Relationships with other species tend to be adversarial, skrykes are social predators who use teamwork and strategy to make up for their small size. Skrykes tend to favor smaller herbivores such as tik-tiks and darters as prey, but will tackle game as large as adult ornets with sufficient numbers and organization on their side. Large prey like ornets or serrats generally require specialized tactics though, skrykes have been known to drive them off cliffs on occasion. Despite their intelligence skrykes are near the bottom of the Araean predator heirearchy. Dune tyrants are avoided at all costs, although skrykes do scavenge from their kills. Despite dune tyrants being viewed as a serious threat, skrykes also tend to regard them with a measure of respect and the tyrannosaurid's semi-benevolent role in skryke folklore reflects this. the oviraptoran vorgas on the other hand, are considered a deadly menace and are so loathed that unless facing certain starvation skrykes will not feed off a carcass if it has already been fed off of by vorgas. Young vorgas are summarily killed whenever they are encountered unprotected.
Skrykes are oddly tolerant of the agilisuchian crocodile A.velox. apparently viewing them as a useful clean-up crew, as such they are very rarely eaten by skrykes. the land-crocs tend to skulk on the fringes of skryke clan gathering areas feeding off of leftover scraps of meat and the vermin drawn to them. If the skrykes shift to another gathering place (as they often do a few times a year) their contingent of scaly camp cleaners will usually follow behind them.

Like parrots, corvids, etc.. skrykes are very skilled mimics and some individuals are able to become quite fluent in the human languages spoken on the island such as English, Dutch, German, Korean and Turkish (and others). During the human-skryke conflict, special "mimics" would lure enemy patrols into traps with an impersonation of a human voice, or spread chaos by imitating officers and shouting out rapid contradicting orders to human soldiers. conversational skryke speech often omits words like "the", "and" , and large complicated multi syllable words are not often used. Most skrykes have a grating, high-pitched, or slightly nasally tone when speaking a human language. When speaking a human language while angry or threatening (such as issuing a warning in terms a human can understand) most skryke's will adopt a deeper, extremely harsh growling voice to accentuate their point. Skrykes who are especially skilled mimics however can perform nearly perfect imitations of a human voice.
watching a skryke speak english etc.. is a strange sight since their words often do not synch up with their jaw movements. Like birds skryke's manipulate sounds almost exclusively in their throats without using lips or their tongues. so watching a skryke speak is at times a bit like watching actors in a foreign language movie that's been dubbed in English