Corvid
There's a few places we've found where the timeline is at about the same stage. That makes me wonder if we'll find someplace where the timeline is equal to our present-day, and these guys have cars, guns, atom bombs, and I wonder if they'll have horror movies about hairy little egg-stealers organizing and acting intelligently.
For The Birds
The asteroid hit. The dinosaurs died. And in the aftermath, the war for dominance was won by the birds, who occupied the niches left vacant by their reptilian kin. The mammals, for the most part, remained small, other than a few branches which showed early promise but then faded. While a handful of giant mammalian species remain, they're oddities which are slowly but surely being reduced in number and dominance, especially where they meet this planet's sapient inhabitants.At some point in Corvid's history, a few million years ago, a species of mid-sized bird that fed on fruits and tree-dwelling insects found its habitat shrinking. They had grown too large to fly far or fast, but they had clever brains and claws well-adapted to grasping and manipulating, peeling tough rinds or digging out burrowing worms. They began to adapt to the grasslands, but their claws were ill-suited to walking. Fortunately, their wings, grown bulkier but shorter for their treetop lifestyle, could support them for brief periods, leaving their claws free.
And so a rapid feedback loop happened. The longer they could walk on their wings, the more they could use their claws. The more they could use their claws, the more they could manipulate their environment. This ability was useful in proportion to intelligence, so, they grew smarter. The smarter they got, the more ways they found to use their claws. And so on. Their legs and feet grew longer and more agile, even as their wings grew more muscular. They had always lived in flocks; now they chirped and twittered in increasingly complex ways, teaching their young instead of relying on instinct. Found sticks and stones were shaped to be better suited for their purposes. They learned to carry fire, then to create it.
They don't look like Baseline ideas of "bird men" - they walk on their forelimbs, and manipulate with their hindlimbs; their posture is more horizontal, though they have evolved joints and spines that let them raise their head and torso to peer over tall grass. But it takes no more than a few minutes of hidden observation to understand these are thinking beings. They talk, they make tools, they show signs of complex social arrangements even within small bands.
And this creates some problems.
Prime Directive?
Corvid represents sapience at the earliest level thus far encountered. There are worlds with no thinking beings, and there are worlds with thinking beings, human or otherwise, at various levels of technological and cultural progress, but this is the first world where self-awareness is still limited to one region and both technology and society are at a very early level. All study so far has been extremely hands-off, and a lot of what's "known" about their behavior is guesswork based on apply human biases. Not only is it likely that any human spotted will be seen as potential prey or threat, it is feared that, Heisenberg style, any kind of interaction with the nascent culture will distort it, and what would be studied is the post-contact culture.There is no formal BREACH policy for this, nor are there any global policies, though many, many, armchair philosophers have filled petabytes of internet chatter with what should "obviously" be done. (And as with any such policy, the issue becomes enforcement, as it is inevitable those with the power to impose a rule are the ones most likely to benefit from breaking it.)
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