Jahkatians

Basic Information

Anatomy

The jahkatians are a mammalian and avian hybrid that closely resemble the gryphons of lore. Their top halves resemble a hawk like bird or a falcon. Their feathers cover the entirety of their heads and down to the lower half of their torsos and down to their elbows. Their lower halves are covered in fur and resemble the felinoid ralai. They have feathered wings on their backs and a feline tails on their rears.
Their forearms are ridged much like a bird’s and may be a dull yellow, gray or black. Their fingers are long and dextrous and ended in curved, wicked talons. Their beaks can have a mix of colors, being the same yellow, black or gray as their forearms, or a shifting tone with white and dark blue or black.
Their feathers vary in tone, mottled white with browns and blacks being the most common. With red and even blue being a rarer trait.
Their fur can be a wide range of colors with a couple of patterns. Brown, tawny, black, gray, and red are the most common base colors, with white and blue being more rare. Their fur may have a striped pattern, with these stripes able to be the same range as the base colors. They may also have a spotted pattern, with these spots seen in pockets around their lower halves, or even across all of their fur. Occasionally, these spots may be hollow circles, with the base color seen in the middle of them. Their feathers have the same range of colors, and can have mixed tones.
Their eyes may be green, blue, red, golden, or amber, with black being a rare trait.
One of the most distinguishing features of a jahkatian is their feathered wings. Normally, these wings are large enough to permit efficient gliding. A rarer few, about two percent, have abnormally large that are capable of flight. Unlike arkatians, wingless jahkatians are a genetic anomaly.
Their hands are made up of bony talons with a thick skin. Their claws may be dangerously sharp and strong, difficult to break. Their beaks have a hooked shape with no teeth inside, but there are teeth meant for chewing, further back in their mouths, past the beak.
Their padded paws are digitigrade like most other species, and they do resemble the ralai. However unlike the ralai, the jahkatians cannot retract their claws.
Their tails vary in appearance. Some are thinly furred, flexible appendages. Others are thick in both weight and fur, and some may end in large tufts of fur.
Unlike Terran birds, manjy jahkatians do not have smooth, flat feathers on their heads. The feathers at the center of their heads may point straight up or point backwards, and extend all the way down the backs of their necks and to the upper backs, becoming smaller until they vanish. It is possible for a jahkatian to fold these feathers against their bodies, offering some emotional expression. On either side of their head feathers are the tufts of their ears, capped in down feathers that point backwards, making their ears look larger than they are. These ears lack the easy movement of some species, and do not offer any emotional queues.

Genetics and Reproduction

Jahkatians lay eggs, often in pairs, about two months after fertilization. These eggs take another two months to hatch, with a better survival rate compared to the arkatians. After hatching, the hatchlings can be breastfed. Like the arkatians, jahkatians have three natural sexes that are equally likely at birth: male, female, and hermaphrodites that are visually indistinguishable from females.

Additional Information

Perception and Sensory Capabilities

Their hearing is better than an arkatians, but not as keen as most species. Their sense of smell is unusually lackluster. Their eyesight, however, is very keen. Jahkatians are capable of focusing it on miniscule or distant objects to better see them, catching small details at distance where other species can’t. However, this is at the cost of awful vision in low-light to dark conditions.

Civilization and Culture

History

A common trend among jahkatians, and a major part of their culture on Katia, is a deep respect for their elders. Often, a jahkatian will refer to their parents or any other older family members for guidance. Leaders are often chosen for their age, although the species is not blind to experience.
The older generations hold much sway over the young, and direct the species as a whole. Unfortunately, with young voices often being suppressed by the old, this makes the jahkatians, historically, unreceptive to change. Before being united with the arkatians on Katia and both species reached the stars, the jahkatians were very resistant to ending hostilities. Spited elders poured hatred and resentment into the minds of the young, despite the arkatians simply wishing for past conflicts to die.
This is far less of a problem in modern times, and the jahkatian elders are considered less stubborn than even modern neishor. But if the UTO ever has to go through massive internal reform, it is expected that the jahkatians, with the neishor, would be the most resistant to sweeping change.
There does seem to be an instinctive tendency for jahkatians to listen to their elders, but it is not a powerfully strong drive, and typically only stays within the family on heavily mixed worlds. In the military, it’s eliminated near completely through training, as the military heavily stresses listening to rank rather than experience.

Origin/Ancestry

Gryphons

Lifespan

183 years (Earth)

Average Height

1.75 valen (21.57 meters) (70.77 feet)

Average Weight

79.444 kilofaarir (148.91 metric tons) (164.15 tons)