Mihirung

Weight (Wild): 485 - 530 lbs

Height (Wild): 6'6" - 7"

Weight (Domesticated): Up to 1650 lbs

Height (Domesticated): Up to 10 ft

Social Unit: Flock

Native to: Atlantea

Habitat: Generally any flat terrain without dense forest cover

The mihirung (also known as the Genyornis or Yiri Terror Bird) is a large flightless bird native to the Yiri Archipelago on the Planet Atlantea. Mihirung are omnivorous, with massive beaks specifically designed to brutally crush anything they can fit inside them, whether it be cockatoos or coconuts.

This allows them to live basically anywhere in the archipelago with flat enough terrain for it to run from predators, since mihirung can reach speeds of up to 55 mph when threatened. This allows it to outrun even the quinkana, the fastest predator on the islands. Even when ambushed by ambush predators like the megalania, it is by no means defenseless: on each foot it sports three extremely sharp, bladelike claws (the middle toe's claw can be up to 6 inches in length), and a kick from a mihirung can cause serious bodily harm to or even kill most predators. The exception to this is the drop bear, an ambush predator which swoops down from tall trees and usually already has its teeth in a mihirung's windpipe by the time it can react. As a result, Mihirungs rarely venture into the Coorabar Alps. Another predator the mihirung often fares poorly against is the saltwater crocodile, due to its ability to appear from seemingly nowhere and end the mihirung's life in one quick bite to the neck.

As mentioned above, mihirungs are not picky eaters and will consume basically everything they can crush with their massive beaks. Along the coasts, coconuts are a favorite, and mihirungs have often been observed kicking coconut palms and other trees to get the fruit to fall to the ground where they can consume it. In addition, they have even been seen fishing in water shallow enough for them to wade in, though this leaves them vulnerable to predation by sharks and saltwater crocodiles. In more inland regions, mihirungs generally graze, browse shrubs, kill and eat small animals, eat carrion (sometimes even scaring off dingoes from their kills), and eat fruits such as wild bananas, breadfruit, finger limes, and bush tomatoes.

Mihirungs have one of the most powerful bites of any bird in the entire galaxy, easily being able to crush through the shells of tortoises or pulverize coconut crab exoskeletons. However, since mihirung are not dedicated hunters, they will generally not eat any creature larger than a cockatoo or coconut crab. They also avoid most of Yiri's snakes, since they have no venom immunity.

Despite being generalists, mihirungs almost always forage in nomadic flocks of anywhere from six to 100 birds, led by a top hen (the largest female). Because of the fact that they will eat basically anything in their path, mihirung flocks must be constantly on the move, as they will strip the area bare of biomass if they stay in one place for too long, especially in the case of larger flocks. Apart from this general roaming the landscape, mihirungs will migrate to the coasts during the dry season and then move back inland when the rains return.

Apart from food being more available in coastal areas during the dry season, mihirungs also nest during the dry season, and grassy sand dunes on beaches are the perfect spots for them to do so. Just before the wet season starts, males will usually leave their flock and join a different one, mating with any of the females in that flock instead of their own (it has been theorized that this is an evolutionary adaptation to prevent incest). As they reach sexual maturity, males develop a large, brightly colored (the color is one of many determined at birth by genetics but is always bright) inflatable sac on their throats that they use to make loud booming sounds to attract females.

By the time mihirungs arrive at the beach for the dry season, mature females will usually be heavily pregnant and will pick a sand dune, make the top into a makeshift nest, and fill it with up to 60 blue-green eggs (similar in color to those of emus but much larger). The father of the eggs will forage out into the surrounding landscape to gather food for himself and some to bring back for the female, who stays at the nest incubating and guarding the eggs. Since the entire flock nests on the same beach, mihirungs have evolved much shorter egg hatching times than one would expect for birds of their size, mainly to avoid stripping the entire area bare of resources before the eggs hatch. As a result, mihirung eggs only take around 40 days to hatch. Mihirung hatchlings, due to their short hatch time, are weak and utterly helpless upon hatching, not even being able to stand up until a week later.

The plumage of mihirung chicks also differs markedly from that of adult birds, being much more downy to conserve heat and being striped to camouflage them in tall grass. In adults on the other hand, plumage is a much more uniform light brown, with darker shades on the tail and vestigial wings. Once mihirung chicks start growing, they grow fast, reaching full size and sexual maturity at around two years of age for females and three for males. Mihirings can be quite long-lived, with some individuals reaching 65 years of age.

Despite looking superficially similar to the smaller emus present in the Yiri Archipelago, mihirungs are much more closely related to waterfowl. While its closest living relative on Atlantea is the magpie goose, its closest extant relative overall is the diatryma (also known as the Aurean Terror Bird) native to the planet Aurea.

When encountering sentients, mihirungs generally approach them curiously unless they either get too close to a nesting site or try to attack the birds (in which cases they tend to get disemboweled by the birds' massive toe claws). As a result of their reluctance to attack sentients unprovoked, their social structure, and their willingness to eat just about anything, the sentients of Yiri have produced a domesticated variant of the mihirung.

Thousands of years of selective breeding has produced mihirung breeds of all shapes and sizes, ranging from the tiny Coonibango to the massive Jubenar. Some breeds are used for meat, some for eggs, some for labor (i.e. as pack animals or for pulling plows and such), and some are used for riding and even racing. The fastest racing mihirungs have been recorded at over 75 mph in short bursts, faster than any bird in the entire galaxy. Throughout the history of the area, various tribes on Yiri have used mihirungs as war mounts for cavalry. Mihirungs bred for riding are generally faster than horses, but less manoeuverable. As a result, they are used more in cavalry charges than complex flanking manouvers.

The relationship between sentients and wild mihirungs, however, is much more complicated. If a flock wanders into a fruit orchard, farmers can often lose entire harvests, as the birds find the fruits typically grown on Yiri (coconuts, bananas, breadfruit, jackfruit, and pineapples) absolutely delicious and will not hesitate to clear an entire area. While surface vegetable crops are often eaten by mihirungs (rice and sugarcane are especially enticing to the birds), root vegetables (such as yams and taro) are generally safe, as mihirungs do not really care for the way the leaves of these plants taste, and mihirungs can't really dig for roots.

In addition, they will sometimes target young livestock (such as bunyip joeys). Both this and their tendency to feed on crops makes most farmers see wild mihirungs as an extreme pest, resulting in many instances of sentients killing wild mihirungs en masse. This became especially problematic in the years just after the Tatian War, when explosive population growth on Yiri and the introduction of new crops from other planets was causing an increase in demand for agricultural land. As sentients and their farms encroached on mihirung habitat, many farmers would find their fields and orchards completely devastated by wild birds. This became such a problem that the people begged the Atlantean Military to intervene. Thus, the "Great Mihirung War" of 33 AR had begun.

Due to incompetent leadership and lackluster funding, the effort ended up being a complete failure for the Atlantean Military, with a total of only 72 of the animals killed before the government decided to call the campaign off. In fact, more sentients were killed during the "Great Mihirung War" than birds, with 107 sentients reported dead, mostly the result of disembowelment by claw, although 21 died from friendly fire. Additionally, due to incidents where they were mistaken for juvenile mihirungs, over a dozen emus were killed as well. This would go down in history as a huge embarrassment for the Atlantean Government, and became the joke of the entire galaxy. With the problem of wild mihirung flocks raiding crops still unresolved, the government introduced a bounty system where individual hunters would be paid money for every wild mihirung head they sent in to a government office.

This worked, for a time, until sentients began to realize that wild mihirungs were being killed so frequently that they had been driven to the verge of extinction by the year 60 AR, less than 30 years since the bounty was introduced. As a result, the bounty program was immediately ceased and mihirungs became protected under Atlantean law. By this time, chain link fences had been developed that prevented mihirungs from raiding crops, making the threat to farms close to nonexistent. While wild mihirungs are less numerous than they once were, their numbers have been on the rise since they were protected, and they are projected to return to the numbers they were at before the bounty was introduced within a century.