Heron Lake Plateau Coo coo for cocoa puffs

YIPE! Owen fell right over onto his backside, crumpling in surprise before flailing in distress at the small white thing that had just come flying over at him out of nowhere. Yyaaaah-ah-aaawwhhrrrruh! He tucked his tail deep under his creamy belly and kept making noises of horror and distress as the grub thunked unloved down to the earth while meantime Owen kept flinging his forepaws crazily about even as he looked wildly about for where that thing was and whether or not it was about to attack him again. All his uncoordinated exertions shortly sent him thudding down into the dust on his side in an even less-graceful sprawl. He sat there for a moment in confused embarassment, until he spotted the grub wriggling in distress down there on the dirt not too far from his face, which sent him scrambling upright once again. He looked up at the bigger white creature with hurt and bewilderment, and then reared all the way back in alarm and fell over again as she shoved her face right up into his. Oh shit! He'd known coming outside was a Really Bad Idea today, and yet he'd done it anyway! This was how it was all going to end, with him wallowing gracelessly in the dirt and watching his own overcurious foolishness feed him to the monster he had known must be lurking out here! He only hoped everyone else could learn from his tragic bad example.

It had been babbling some sort of nonsense at him throughout the spectacle he'd created of himself, but Owen hadn't been paying much attention; what he had heard and processed in the midst of his own noisy distress only served to confuse him further. Why was this creature repeating his own noises back at him? They made even less sense coming out of its strange gray beak than from his own freshly-toothed jaws. Owen flailed ineptly about, lying there on his back like an overturned beetle and unable to remember quite how to coordinate himself enough to haul himself back onto his feet again. He'd be easy prey for sure. He squinched his eyes shut with a final yawp of despair, and waited for the end to come. He jumped however—relatively speaking, as best he could on his back in the dirt that is, so in essence moving maybe three inches at most and only sideways at that—when out of nowhere the feathery white monster barked in his ear. What the—?! Heart pounding, Owen squeezed one blue eye open and stared at the creature in increasingly fascinated bafflement. Why was he not dead? Or were all the feathery bird-smelling creatures completely incompetent and benign mosters, not just the one that Mommy kept inviting into the den? Huh.

Mentally Owen checked himself over to make sure he was intact—maybe the thing was just very sneaky about the bites it took out of people? ...Nope. He was fine. His tail uncurled itself a bit from where it had glued itself to his belly, and he stared again at the feathery white thing in wonder. ...Although—another lightbulb went on in his head quite suddenly—perhaps that was why it was making such a mishmash of things, and why it seemed to start off only repeating everything he said. The poor thing was doubtless terribly deformed, with a jaw like that, on top of everything; Owen had felt sorry for his little sister Kite, whom he'd noticed had a lot of trouble getting around compared to the rest of them. And yet even with its obviously much more bizarrely wrong little gray stick-legs, here, this creature seemed to dance around pretty nimbly; in some ways it had learned to live with its misshapen parts quite well, obviously. Maybe Kite could learn a thing or two from it. On the other paw... it didn't seem to be able to figure out how to properly eat its puppy prey, either. Owen was torn between pity and horror, at this; he didn't really want it to learn to eat better if it meant that it was going to shortly eat him, after all, but you did have to feel at least a little sorry for a creature who had such troubles filling its belly! That was probably why it was trying to stab and eat those obviously-inedible little squirmy white things, too. Yes, it all made sense now, Owen thought as he slowly uncurled himself. —He wondered in passing if perhaps the tiny squiggly things were the birdmonster's own young; they were the same color, after all, just as most of his own parents' offspring had at least some of their coloring shared, too. It seemed a reasonable enough supposition.

Owen wriggled awkwardly onto his rolly-polly brown side and clumsily pawed an indicating set of toes at his opened mouth. Ah ah ah ah? Were you hungry, little birdthing? Were you taking off your disguise to eat me? Were your babies at all tasty, or would you possibly like to find something better to drink? All of these were great questions that were probably not actually coming across in Owen's awkward attempt at charades, he dismally realized. ...So he threw in an inept bit of the ptero @Towhee had been teaching them, as well, flicking an ear pointedly and half-shrugging a shoulder as he worked his uncooperative little body in another vague wiggle. Yeah. That should help.