Ikea bird

pasted from discord

ikea bird, one of the Bep's fire warning animals. I've dubbed it the ikea bird bc it's blue and yellow; they're mostly blue, but have yellow coverts and ... head plumage that is obscured by puffed-up blue feathers when grounded. they make Rather Loud Noises and turn noticeably more yellow when showing off their plumage or flying.

natively they're known as egg birds, since they're yellow on the inside or something like that.

the downside of ikea birds is that they're still bloody loud when squawking about things that noticeably are not fires. their mating seasons (longer dry periods) are among the main reasons the Bep are so good at sound-isolating walls and headwear.

(wouldn't isolating yourself from the sound make it hard to discern when there's a fire and defeat the whole point? — ah but you see, parts of Bep society are semi-nocturnal and will definitely notice anyhow. the birds are also often trained to flock around settlements when there's a fire (fire means the humans put out food, etc). this sometimes leads to false alarms because the birds are hungry and clever but it's not a very prominent issue.)

(although every ten years or something there's a nationwide """fire""" because the ikea birds all manage to scare each other shitless)

context?
Selectively breeding animals to be scared of fire works by grabbing a bunch of animals, lighting a fire, seeing which ones are the most terrified and then breeding those and seeing what you end up with.

Early on this started w/ the Bep simply taking in wild animals they noticed were noisier when there was a fire, but they've obv. gotten more methodical about it since. Rainforest; ofc it's not enough on its own, but having a (decently long) wet season means it's easier to contain fires at least some of the time. they have some history of slash-and-burn agriculture, moving between naturally isolated islands, but this isn't sustainable at a larger scale and hasn't really been in use for hundreds of years by now.