Spawn Killers

65 MPE (Late Cryocene) | South Anciska (Temperate Forest)

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It is a dark, humid late summer's night in a pineflower forest at the edge of the coastal sand dunes. In a couple of months, it will be much cooler and drier, with night temps well below freezing. But it is still hot now, with little relief even with the sun below the horizon. The dog days of summer are upon us now. And it is a time of plenty. The darkness is filled with noise - chirping, clicking, and fluttering. So many birds and so many insects, as they go about cryptic after-dark lives, produce a constant background buzz, as they take advantage of the most productive months of the year, when plants grow fastest and food is easy to find. But if you listen closely, in a woodland clearing where the river overflowed a few years ago and left a fine, muddy sediment, easily dug and warmed by the sun overhead by day, you will hear something new. First one quiet voice, barely audible, starts peeping out from beneath the dirt, In a few hours, it has been joined by hundreds more, as the earth itself seems to hum with so many little calls. For this is where the elegant serestriders this past spring buried their basketball-sized eggs. Now they are hatching, synchronizing their activities with their soft chirps. After twelve weeks below ground, the time has come to be born.

The plant-eating serestriders, when grown, can stand 32 feet tall and bludgeon all would-be predators with deadly club-like wings. But now, they are only 18 inches high, and they are defenseless. As the first of them pop their heads above the substrate and see the shadowed world around them for the very first time, they can only dart away to cover in the vegetation. They have awaken into a dangerous world. No one wants to be the first out, but waiting too long is also risky. Predators like these crowned swordbills, a type of skyke and a dog-sized cousin of the tyrant serins, will hone-in on the hatching almost as soon as it begins, and catch as many of the helpless chicks as they can before the annual bounty is over and the survivors have scattered. For the first few years of life their only chance of survival is to run and to hide. Their numbers are their best defense in this first and most crucial day of life, but this is purely a game of odds with no guarantee for any individual. Once once emerges, the others quickly follow, even as all around them the fast-running and agile swordbills run down, and end the lives of their less fortunate siblings only minutes after they began, snatched up by a leg, a wing, or a neck in their long, cold pincer-beaks to be swallowed whole.

The swordbills seem gluttonous, ravenously swallowing up one life after another, with so little time in between that for a short time the chicks can be heard to continue their plaintive chirping from down within their throats, as they slowly are worked down into the stomach where their short journey will come already to its end. But this is a temporary, fleeting feast for the hunters, one that can make or break their own survival, especially the juveniles who have just a couple more months of time left to fatten up before the winter. And like a swarm, the chicks keep coming up for almost an hour, and each one makes a mad dash for a thicket in which to hide, running the gauntlet of hungry mouths, hoping luck is on their side and those jaws are already preoccupied with eating someone else. By the time the last have emerged, the swordbills are satiated. Unable to fit a single bite more in their gullets, they lay lethargic and can only watch the rest of the feast scurry safely out of reach. Around two-thirds have survived their first trial. And afterward, for a short moment, they can rest. But until they are big enough to stop hiding and join the adults, their life will be but a series of such dangerous experiences. Less than one in eighty will reach the age of five, and still they are vulnerable then, facing many dangers. By ten, when the first of them may begin to breed and near adult size, only around one in 120 will have survived. But once fully mature, the lucky ones can live into their 80's, breeding every few years. Only through sheer number of offspring do these birds, which do not protect their young or even recognize them, manage to ensure that at least enough reach their own adulthood to eventually replace them in the population and keep their species alive.