Great Blue Salt Lake and Saltspray Sandhills

Serinaustra's great blue salt lake is an old, landlocked saltwater lake that was formed by seawater inundation 20 million years ago, differing from all other lakes near its size which were formed from glacial runoff and rain. It is Serina's largest isolated saltwater lake, and has a salinity that varies seasonally, yearly, and from one part to another, from from 25 to 36 ppt (parts per thousand). Compared to Serina's oceanic salinity at this time, which averages slightly higher than Earth's (36 ppt), at 38-39 ppt, this comes out to being slightly lower on average, but at its saltiest, it equals most earth seawater in salinity. This lake has remained saline due to having few natural outlets; rain fills it, but this water evaporates again, and so the salt levels remain stable. It only overflows its banks occasionally, and so releases some of its water through tributaries into the sea; rarely, over its long existence, the sea level has risen enough to reverse the flow of these rivers and introduce new seawater into this basin. The western shore of the salt lake, where prevailing winds produce waves and carry sediments to land, has become Serina's second largest inland dune habitat. Known as the saltspray sandhills, it is a raindesert region that is surrounded by forest.

The great blue salt lake hosts many endemic species, but also attracts visitors from far and wide across the surrounding jungle, as creatures seek out a vital mineral rare in the rainforest, but limitless here. They may travel days to reach it, and do so every few months, licking salt which dries on the surfaces of coastal trees or rocks, or even drinking from the sea itself. Here several giraffowl and a squaboon come to visit the quiet shore of the sea in the early morning hours while seabirds frolic and fly, a large scarreot feeds on the coconut-like seeds of sedge palms, as swampstalkers and tugansers sun themselves, and a pair of seademons rest, cleaning their fur before heading out to feed. Sand dunes in the near distance provide a stark and unusual contrast to the typical forest biome of the region, and function as an island of unique biodiversity, a desert in the middle of the jungle 

A lack of long-lasting connections to the sea has meant that this lake is an extraordinary insular habitat, lacking most common marine animals, and with its own endemic floral communities which include an eclectic mix of both marine macroalgae and freshwater-originated vascular plants. There are no dolfinches and no seahorses within it, and for millions of years its only grazers were sealumps which could access it over land. Around 10 million years ago, however, a species of early whelican similar to the modern waterhogs colonized the lake by traveling up a temporary river of runoff leading to the sea. It found an environment with few aquatic predators, and a vast quantity of vegetation to be found with relatively few competitors. Though early whelicans were carnivorous, seaweed is generally more nutritive than land plants, and it is easier to digest, as it lacks the amount of cellulose needed to support a plant on land. Thus, these colonists began supplementing their diet with the abundant greenery very early on, and in a relatively short span of time, primarily vegetarian species diverged. They adapted three of their tentacles into muscular grasping limbs to rip up vegetation and stuff it in the mouth, while the nail on their lowest tentacle elongated into a tusk-like claw, which they used like a pick to uproot the plants from the sediment. For their resemblance to a certain, very unrelated sort of animal with similar-looking trunked appendages and tusks, they became known as wheliphants.

There are several species of wheliphants in the great blue salt lake today, which is the only place in the world these unusual scroungers are found. The biggest and most remarkable, though, is the wondrous whelican, which can weigh over 2,500 pounds. Both sexes of this wonderful animal are vibrantly colored and exhibit black and white bands along their faces; males have richer hues, including blue faces, violet throats, and sometimes even a band of green along their flanks, but even females are bright, only slightly more subdued than the male. The tusk of the male wondrous whelican can grow to four feet long, and is used to joust with other males over mating rights and serves as a signifier of fitness itself. Females, too, have one - albeit just half as long, and both sexes also use it to dig up food. A common foraging technique for all wheliphants is to suck water into their throat pouch and quickly eject it as a jet while picking at the soil under a plant's roots, so as to wash it away and allow the animal to more easily rip it out from the substrate to eat. 

Though they can swim, wheliphants prefer to walk on the bottom of fairly shallow water and push themselves with their feet to graze, occasionally jumping to the surface to snatch a breath, and then dropping back down to resume their meal. Like waterhogs, wheliphants have their nostrils enclosed within their tentacle nets, and so to breathe, they extend them and fill the oral cavity with air, which is then stored there so they can prolong their time below the water between breaths.

Wheliphants can still come onto land, despite their size, and may do so to rest fairly frequently. They have less flipper-like feet than most whelicans, and so can push themselves surprisingly well onto the beach. Brooding parents may haul out on land, but are more likely to rest in water too shallow to cover their backs while they incubate their egg in their throat pouch - this way, they can more quickly retreat from danger. A social herd animal, the wheliphant is known for being cooperative in defending the herd's vulnerable young from predators like the relatives of swampstalkers that also roam this isolated waterway. When danger is near, the herd surrounds their helpless and angle each of their tusks outward in a deadly defensive barricade.

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The rivercarver remains an ecosystem engineer in the late hothouse. Rather than a single species, rivercarvers now make up a genus of closely related species. These animals are named for their behavior of digging out the banks of waterways to create calm, shallow pools of water in which their preferred prey, crustaceans like crayfish, can proliferate in abundance. They guard these pools from rivals, both within their own species and outside it, and also use them as safe refuges for the development of their young, which are cared for for a long time relative to most burdles. Over thousands of years, the digging of rivercarvers turns simple rivers into vast wetlands of slow-moving waterways with many small, semi-separated pools that are highly conducive to host diverse plant and animal life. 

The dunesplitter is a species of rivercarver that is adapted to the saline water of the great blue salt lake, which has the salinity of seawater. It expels the excess salt in its environment, as do many birds, out of its nostrils, and can shoot it for some distance. Dunesplitters face novel challenges in a marine environment, albeit a land-locked one, when they originated in fresh or brackish water; though adults can tolerate the higher salinity, their young cannot. This poses a problem in regards to reproduction that the dunesplitter has learned to solve by taking advantage of the local topography, as well as the weather.

The western shore of the great blue salt lake is distinctive for its coastal sand dunes, which can reach heights of 650 feet. These sand piles originate as sediment washed ashore by water currents and then blown into piles by the wind. Dune systems adjacent to inland water bodies occur in a few other places; the tallest dunes of all are found to the east of the polar basin, and smaller ones northeast of the Centralian sea, wherever prevailing winds deposit them. But only here, in the salt lake, do the dunes get shifted not only by wind, but also by animal activity. Dunesplitters are so named because they actively create channels from the seashore, up the beach, and straight through coastal dunes in order to produce sheltered backwaters where their prey can proliferate. Initially these pools are saltwater, like the sea. During this early period, they are unsuitable for breeding. But over several months, the pools become separated from the ocean as the channels that connect them fill in with sand. Rather than evaporate and become saltier, rainfall now floods the isolated ponds and reduces them to a low brackish salinity. Marine life that colonized the initial pond dies out, but is replaced by colonists from freshwater. And in these older interdunal pools, which eventually become freshwater as they overflow their banks and eventually lose their original saltwater altogether, the dunesplitter can now nest and rear its young. Pairs guard their progeny for over a year, and will even transport them on their backs overland to a new pool if the current one becomes inundated with seawater, as in a storm, or if it runs out of food. Young dunesplitters grow up fat and happy in their sheltered refuge of freshwater and abundant food; they begin to leave their natal pools around 13 months of age, by which time their salt glands are well-developed, and they can tolerate prolonged periods in seawater without ill-effects.

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Some animals are a benefit to the salt lake ecosystem, creating habitat. Others, well. They exist here, too...

Lurking in the water of northern Serinaustra's wetlands, including this lake, is a fearsome animal with a powerful bite that you do not want to experience firsthand. Three long tusks emerge from robust, crushing jaws lined with triangular teeth, strong enough to splinter even the largest land animal's bones. It wallows, solitary, anywhere that the water is shallow and calm enough to allow thick water plants to grow, hiding most of its body below the water, often with only the top of its snout visible. Like a dreadful fusion of a hippo and a crocodile, the adactus manages to straddle the niche of both.

The adactus is a descendant of the mordax, and as such, is one of the largest foxtrotters, weighing up to 700 pounds. Its closest relative is the manducus, which evolved from an earlier form of it and became more terrestrial. Adactuses have remained semi-aquatic and strongly associated with water. And though as much as 75% of their day to day diet is plant food, which they rip up from its roots with their tusks, they are still formidable predators, like their early hothouse ancestor. Adactuses, especially males, are extremely aggressive and territorial over their domains and try to kill nearly anything which they consider to be invading their space. Erupting from the water where they rest, they bite whatever comes too close, instantly killing small species like lumpelopes or brutally snapping the leg of a giraffowl so that it cannot walk, making it easy to drag it below the surface to drown. The teeth toward the front of the mouth remain sharp enough to tear flesh, even though the molars have lost their carnassial shear, and become more adapted to grind plants.

There are very few animals in Serinaustra which bother the bloodthirsty adactus - not even the squabgoblin will dare threaten this creature.  Their main limiting factor, rather than a predator or competing species, is their own kind. Male adactuses kill each other on sight, and so within a given range of suitable habitat, sometimes for over 50 square miles, there is likely to be only a single, battle-scarred adult male. Females, for their part, are more avoidant of others than outright homicidal, especially when caring for a single pup; they cannot afford to risk its life just to win a confrontation. Males are barely tolerant of females and their own immature young, which they may be able to recognize by scent, though this means little except that they do not instantly attack them - the male takes no part in child-rearing, and still drives them away from his primary feeding grounds. Mortality among young males is extremely high, and fewer than one in twenty can be expected to survive its first year of independence from its mother. Older, established males go out of their way to kill future competitors before they are a significant threat, and will cannibalize them, rarely wasting a potential meal. This produces a highly skewed sex ratio of only one adult male per 20-30 females, and genetic mutations can spread very quickly as a result of relatively few founders, and most females mating with the same partners. If this intra-species aggression did not occur, however, the adactus would likely severely alter its landscape, to the detriment not only of other species, but to themselves. As very destructive feeders,  a single adactus can quickly strip a wide area of shoreline bare of all vegetation, and were they more numerous, could effectively prevent entire populations of land animals from accessing necessary drinking water. Without a significant predator, the adactus evolved to actively control its own population through its violent tendencies, and so keep itself in balance. 

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Much smaller, and far less threatening, is the sanddiver. While the adactus is wide ranging and exists outside the salt lake region, this a small, specialized burdle native only to the saltspray sandhills along the salt lake's western shore. It is one of the most derived of all burdles, a strange, burrowing animal with extremely large front claws that it carries ahead of its body as it scuttles along on its belly, propelled by shuffling movements of those claws and of its tiny hind feet. The sanddiver belongs to a new lineage of armored burdles evolved from the digdag, which have begun to diversify in the end hothouse. Called dagadillos, their armor has evolved into a flexible, segmented shell that allows them to roll up when threatened, with only their sharp claws left out to defend their underbellies. Sanddivers are the smallest, and are among the littlest adult burdles except for a few murds, reaching no more than 8 inches long and weighing just 9 ounces.

Sanddivers have their origin in the adjacent forest, where other members of its genus, of similar shape, are called scuttleburds. They still make permanent burrows below ground, but often emerge at night to hunt insects and worms in thick deposits of jungle leaf litter. But sanddivers are now only found in the sandhills, a difficult environment where it is very hard to construct permanent burrows. Sanddivers have abandoned their sedentary, territorial habit as a result, and they have become nomads. They still move with digging movements beneath the loose sand, but as it typically just collapses again right behind them as they scuttle along, they make no permanent dwellings. Indeed, so unsuitable is the terrain of the sandhills for living in, that the sanddiver does not find food underground at all - it uses the sand only as a cover to ambush prey moving above it. It spends the day hunkered down in the dunes to a depth of 1.5 to 3 feet, and clambers to just beneath the sand's surface shortly after dusk. It relies on sensing the faintest vibrations of insects moving over the sand, and follows them, pursuing its prey from below as if swimming through the desert, and then suddenly jolting upwards with its claws. It snatches them between its two forward-set claws like forceps, to crush them, and then pulls them below to eat them, never lifting it own head out of the sand, and locating them purely by their movements. By traveling below the sand in this way, the sanddiver remains nearly invisible to its own enemies passing overhead, such as flying birds.

These burdles are solitary, but like other relatives, females practice parental care for their young for a prolonged period of time. A single egg is laid in a chamber much, much further underground than the animal normally ventures, up to 40 feet beneath the surface of a dune. Here, the sand is compact and permanently damp, and holds its shape when dug - but there is very little, if anything, to eat. This means hardly any animals are present - and this is exactly why the sanddiver's egg is safe here. She nonetheless guards it for over two months, never leaving its chamber, for she would almost surely be unable to find it again if she returned to the surface and her tunnels caved in behind her as she ascended. Since she lacks the body warmth to brood it, being fully ectothermic, it can only develop as fast as the cool ambient temperatures of the earth allow - and so, it takes quite some time. She spends most of the incubation process sleeping, entering a torpor state that lasts four days or so at a time, before waking to check her egg, and repeating until the chirping of her chick tells her it is time to get ready to return to the surface. Her young one can dig and follow her in just two days time, and it keeps in total body contact with its mother for months so as not to get lost, holding the spike-like scutes on her rump in its beak, and effectively being dragged along. If it ever drops off, it emits a shrill peeping which alerts its mother to turn around and fetch it. It is not independent until around six months of age, though as it gains maturity, it is able to keep up with mother in the sand on its own accord and no longer needs to hold on for safety. 

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Some burdles now dive through sand, but many others still make their home in water. The glurk is a muck-mimicking muck - that is to say, a species of hothouse burdle (descendants of the featherless birds once called "mucks") that has adapted to resemble the debris that collects on the bottom of the water, and to lie among it in order to ambush passing fishes. More specifically, the glurk is the only fully saltwater representative of a clade of Serinaustran burdles called turteels, named for their very long and eel-shaped necks which strike out to catch food while the body lies motionless, hidden against the background. Turteels have no close relatives by 290 million years PE, having diverged very early in the hothouse, but their closest relatives were seastriders, which evolved several million years after they had already split off from the common ancestor.

Turteels are more traditionally reptilian than many contemporary burdles. They are ectotherms with sprawling limbs, and don't brood their own eggs, instead burying them in loose substrate on beaches and letting the sun warm them. All turteels are aquatic, most are ambush predators, and with the exception of the glurk, they live in fresh or rarely brackish water throughout the southern continent. The glurk however is adapted to live within the great blue salt lake, specifically within the  thickets of aquatic vegetation which grow across its eastern edge, opposite to the sand dunes. Winds are weaker near shore here, blowing out to sea rather than to land, allowing large amounts of plant life to take root and grow here, both vascular grasses from the land, and varied forms of macroalgae - seaweeds, colonists from the ocean.

The glurk has long, irregularly shaped scutes and dangling loose skin that disguises its true body shape, and comes in a very wide range of mottled colors and patterns from nearly black to yellow, red, and green, matching many different types of background vegetation as well as open sand beds. Without a lot of cover available, it will bury most of its body out of sight so that only its neck is visible, swaying in the current, resembling a stick or clump of seaweed drifting in the water. Long feeler-like scales on its face can be twitched, sometimes catching the attention of a small fish that mistakes them for some small prey animal darting away - when the fish comes close, the glurk rapidly inhales water into its throat, catching the victim in a burst of suction, then ejecting the water (backwards-facing spines inside its throat ensure the meal does not come back up with the regurgitated water.) Opportunistic and large for a turteel, the glurk sometimes bites animals much too big to swallow down whole; using interlocking beak scutes, it pulls land animals and swimming birds down to drown them, then eats them in small bites by tearing flesh with the bill and holding the carcass down with the claws on the forearms. Though glurks can and do swim in open water when necessary, they are more inclined to walk themselves at a slower pace over the bottom, using their forearms to step along while the more specialized flipper-like hind fins are only used if a sudden burst of speed is required.

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The warm and vegetated waters of the salt lake support a wide variety of underwater grazing birds. Whelicans and burdles are joined by trunkos. The swumps are a genus of large, majestic, and mostly aquatic trunkos descended from the gentle bloblump, which has now undergone a mature sort of glow-up from its once portly condition. All swumps now share thin, elongated necks and streamlined bodies, and all of them feed by dabbling, in which they turn their rumps up in the air and reach their necks down underwater to graze on vegetation along the bottom of shallow water. Their feet are very large and serve as paddles still made up of lobes rather than webbing, but they rarely walk far from water, and their legs are set far back on their bodies to provide quicker swimming at the expense of being very good at running. Though all swumps share these basic traits, the several different species are differentiated even at a great distance by their coloration, which is unmistakable in most. All swumps have a Serinaustran distribution, favoring northern coastal regions; they may be found in both salt- and freshwater.

The black swump is an inland species endemic to the land-locked great blue salt lake. Growing up to 15 feet from tip of beak to tailfeathers, it is one of the largest species, and differs from all swumps for its almost entirely uniform dark plumage, which appears black but shimmers with iridescence in direct sunlight. It is the most basal species of its genus, which is otherwise predominately white in base color, often with variable colored markings. In this respect, the black swump is also the black sheep of its family.

Black swumps are social birds in some respects, though they are also ornery and territorial; they live in closely bonded mated pairs, but these pairs are aggressive and control large tracts of coastal territory during the breeding season, chasing away rivals. Males are larger than females by around 20% and are tasked with protecting their mates when the female broods the single egg in her neck pouch, which like in other sealump descendants is water-tight. While the female alone incubates, the male keeps enemies away - as well as rival males, which may attempt to break her egg and later kill her young chick, reducing competition against his own offspring. Chicks are kept close to one parent at a time for several months and do not dive underwater; they are hatched with an extremely plush down which holds air close to the body, functioning like a life vest, and keeping them safe from predators that lurk in the seaweed in the depths below. At this time, the parents feed the chick and often it rests content upon their backs; by the time its baby coat is shed and it begins to acquire its sleek adult plumage, it is around 80 lbs and now safe from most threats that the shallow vegetated waters of the lake can pose. Now it begins to feed itself, dipping below the waves and collecting seaweed in its flanges, which hook plants with barb-like keratin spines and push them into its mouth, and with its trunk, which can reach even further to grab morsels out of reach to the flanges. Adults are mainly plant-eaters, but also consume incidental invertebrates and occasional fish in their large mouthfuls of vegetation. Chicks are more broadly omnivorous and will go out of their way to chase and catch anything small enough to fit in their mouths, including young of other waterbirds; up to 60% of their diet is animal-based in the first 3-6 months of life.

Both parents, but especially the male, are extremely attentive to their chicks and will defend their young with extraordinary aggression, biting at predators with a sharp beak normally kept hidden within its flanges, and producing terrifying booming calls. It will go so far as to drown would-be enemies of its young, pushing itself on top of its victim while holding its head below water with its jaws, and keeping it held there until it succumbs. The adult has no predators in the lake, and is so proactive in keeping its young safe, that even their youngest chicks live a life of safety and protection. Very few animals will bother the black swump; even fewer would survive to try doing so a second time. It is a dramatic change from the sedate nature of their early hothouse ancestor, but one which has proven necessary in the late hothouse, which is now a busier, riskier place to live.

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Seraphs, the often-smaller descendants of archangels which have diversified in the hothouse, live here too. The duowhit is a common one, which exhibits very pronounced dimorphism between the sexes, with males being more aquatic than females and subsequently presenting more dramatically webbed feet and rounded spoon-shaped bills, which they use to strain algae and small invertebrates from the surface of the water. Females in contrast have only partial webbing between longer toes and narrow, finely serrated beaks; they run along shorelines and wade in shallow water more than they swim, and their foraging behavior is much more active and selective. Their diet is comprised highly of small, fast animal prey including fishes and insects. Duowhits are a member of a waterfowl-convergent ptoose family evolved from the reedwhit. Not all of these birds, broadly called waterwhits, are so different from male to female, but all species of their genus share this uncommon disparity, which has evolved to reduce or even remove intraspecific food competition. By eating different things in different parts of the lake, males and females function like different bird species and can be more numerous than if both sexes were alike. It is a very successful strategy for a large, genetically healthy population, and for out-competing other species for resources, to the benefit of your own offspring. It also makes sense from a nutritional perspective: males have lower caloric needs than females and can get by on a mostly vegetarian diet, but to produce young, the female needs much more protein.

The male duowhit more closely resembles a duck, while the female is slightly more akin to a rail. Her plumage is earth tones throughout, aiding her in going unnoticed as she broods her nest, but she is not drab, with a reddish, angular head crest that she can raise or lower dependent on her mood. The male, which has no parental role and lives on open water, is bright and contrasting; a steel blue plumage fades to yellow on the breast, while the neck is iridescent green. The head crest is very large and softly rounded, exhibiting sky blue and white banding. Even the voices of the sexes differ, as females emit soft clucking calls like hens while males have high-pitched whistling voices that carry a long distance. Mating occurs throughout the year as males that are fit and well-fed periodically swim inland and call repetitively toward shore, advertising themselves to mates. The more gregarious males court by night after feeding through most of the daylight hours, sleeping in clustered flocks on open water in only two short periods at dusk and dawn; females are primarily nocturnal, and this is when they are usually out feeding, spending the days resting alone in thickets of reeds and other waterside vegetation. Females that are interested in mating will respond to the male's whistles with a quick, sharp note that tells the male to approach her at the shore, while disinterested ones remain silent; the male's night vision is less attuned, and if she freezes he will simply pass her by and go on his way. Mating is quick and partners quickly part afterwards; females create a nest from soft, decomposing foliage in a location just inches from water, forming a mounded island on which she lays her pupa and incubates them for around four weeks. The young are independent immediately and soon fly off. They fill a third niche from either adult sex and are strongly nomadic in their first two years of life, flying over land and foraging on the smallest of flying insects, a sort of air plankton that is highly abundant in the hothouse skies. Their maturity is delayed but rapid once it begins; all waterwhits return to the location of their birth to mature, and for the duowhit this means the blue salt lake. Sexual dimorphism develops immediately once the transition from juvenile to adult begins. Young adult males join groups of others, while females will lead more solitary lives.

 A third adult form is occasionally seen, which does not develop quite like either a male or a female and lives somewhat along the margins of both environments. These are not actually intersex, but are a rare alternate male, presenting a more subdued female plumage and behavior (but with a male-shaped head crest). They may behave as cryptic males, which hang around female territories and swiftly intercept other males as females approach them to breed. On the other side of things, old females may sometimes lose function of their ovary and begin to develop male plumage; hormonal changes can alter their crest shape, feather color, and even increase the extent of webbing on their feet, but does not alter their bill shape. Such females, no longer producing eggs, may find themselves mysteriously drawn to the open water and join male flocks, behaving as if they were male and even courting other females, though they are infertile and never acquire the whistling call of the male, and they are poorer swimmers that may not fare well competitively. Though still very unusual, this phenomenon is not too rare among birds and was once well-documented even in Earth species as common as chickens, where certain old hens would develop the characteristic of roosters with age. 

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The stellatrix is another local bird. Though also a natatory scrounger, it scarcely resembles the wheliphant and is decidedly less specialized, though the ways in which it is distinct are very dramatic. With plumage like a shimmering tapestry of color that seems to sparkle in the light like so many distant stars, flocks of stellatrix, large and majestic descendants of sanguine squibis, begin their show as they wade in the warm shallows of this inland sea. They dip their necks gracefully together, iridescent skin along their long, pointed snouts shining a bright blue like the sky itself, before their faces part into quarters, revealing a tentacled visage at other times kept hidden. Now they reveal fine rows of bristled hairs along each lip, forming a seine. They stir the sediment with a quick-step dance, moving in slowly twisting and turning lines, and then appear to drink up the murky water in big gulps until their throats, extended into pouches as brilliantly blue as the sea, are full to capacity. They then lift their heads and spray the water back out of their mouths, like so many garden sprinklers. Water passes through the sieve-like bristles around each tentacle, but particles of food - crustaceans, fish eggs, algae and detritus - are filtered and held behind, swallowed once the seawater has been emptied. The flock repeats the motion time and again, up to ten times a minute; dancing and dipping, scooping and spraying.

Always on the move as they feed, they continue to stir up new food items as they march along the shore of the sea, until at last their stomachs are filled and they can take a respite from their performance, gathering in some shaded spot up the beach to cavort together, socializing and preening themselves and one another. Now the young ones run from thickets and beneath sheltering roots to greet their parents and elders, chirping with eager joy, nuzzling moms and dads in hope they will share their spoils. Each pair has just one offspring, to which they are devoted for several years. Only in their second year of life does the pale sandy-colored chick begin to acquire the vibrant plumage of the adult, and only in their third does a dull gray skin turn vibrant and blue, and two antennae-like keratin horns begin to rise above the eyes, an ornament that indicates the young has at last reached adulthood and will soon be taking a mate of its own. Courtship of youth is a wonderful affair, as flocks come together and those already coupled step aside to allow the young among them to mingle and pair off with exuberant dancing, leaping and playful chasing as each one eyes up potential partners not just for their looks, or even their strength, but their temperaments, which must also mesh well for a pair to be stable enough to support their own young one day. Once mated, couples are likely to stay together for a long life; devotion is nearly total, and their is little infidelity.

The stellatrix's stunning plumage is a variegated pattern of reds, yellows, blues and greens contrasted as black and white at their most extreme. It serves multiple purposes; in isolation on shore, it is an eye-catching signal to mates of either sex, a sign of health and vitality. In a group, the spots and speckles of many blur into one, making it hard to single out an individual, and making it harder for predators to pick a target. When danger truly does threaten, it then takes on a very different role - camouflage. Stellatrix have dense, heavy bones, a low percentage of body fat, and plumage that is not water resistant. Together these traits mean that in water deeper than their standing height, they sink, not float. They use this uncommon attribute to hide from danger, dipping down below the surface and running away on the bottom of the sea floor. Here they hide among the abundant seaweed and vegetation, colored in greens, browns, and striking red. As the dappled light passes through the water upon their bodies, it matches their white and yellow spots, hiding them in plain sight among the foliage. Able to remain hidden underwater for up to six minutes, they can remain safely out of sight until the danger is passed. Then, one by one, their heads pop up above the water, and they have soon all come back together, reunited once more.

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Without the wide dunes that form from sand blown inland up from the lake's eastern coasts, the western side of the great blue salt lake is a matrix of marshes, lagoons, and shallow, weedy waterways, full of fish and small animals: the ideal habitat for aukocondas, the closest thing there is to a marine skuwyrm. As far as birds go, such legless ones as this are some of the oddest looking of all, and they too find a home along the lake.

Aukocondas are descendants of rat snakes which reached Serinaustra millions of years ago. They are a primitive skuwyrm, as evidenced by their remnant hind legs, used in holding a partner to mate. Aukocondas have no venom, nor do they have the rib-limbs of skythons and trithons. They are active, pursuit predators that stalk seaside habitats along the salt lake, chasing down anything they can catch. They eat all sorts of things, from small mollyminnows to water birds, skuzzards, lumpelope chicks and even scroungers, and kill by holding it in the jaws and wrapping the coils tightly of their body around it, causing cardiac arrest. Diet varies with size, and adults grow to lengths of six to twelve feet, with females larger and able to capture the biggest prey animals. Their bodies are variably colored from a sandy tan to dark green and almost black, usually with two white or yellow stripes running down their length and a varying number of smaller spots on their heads and backs. Males are usually brighter. Like all skuorcs, females give birth to small, live young, in this species as many as 50 of them at a time, each just ten inches long. Young often stick close to their mother for several weeks for protection before going off entirely on their own, and females recognize their own young during this time, but other adults may still eat the young.

These skuwyrms are semi-aquatic and are good swimmers with flat, paddle-like tails. They rarely swim far in open water, though, favoring places with plant cover to snake around and hide within; this is both to avoid their own larger enemies, which include such things as river dragons and swampstalkers, and because they are better at outmaneuvering prey in tight spaces than outrunning it in the open. Known for their aggressive defensive behavior, aukocondas protect themselves with rapid striking bites, using their sharp, fish-catching beaks to slash at enemies, leaving many shallow but bloody wounds on persistent attackers. They are one of relatively few skuwyrms with well-developed vocal abilities, and these animals produce loud hisses when under duress, while communication with barks and croaks at other times. Mothers talk to their young with low-pitched humming, while babies respond with peeping much like a baby duckling. When seeking to court a female, a male aukoconda will even sing, vibrating his throat and producing a bubbly, dove-like cooing. It's a rarely seen soft side to one of the lake's many formidable predators. But even at its fiercest, the aukoconda pales in comparison to the salt lake's apex predators...

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Though smaller than its relatives, the aquatic crossjaw is nonetheless an intimidating animal and one of the largest carnivores to hunt the great blue salt lake. They are less derived than the enormous atrocious crossjaw, and more closely resemble their brawler precursors, but they also exhibit specialization toward hunting fish and aquatic life in a way their relatives do not. Their ossified tentacles are arranged asymmetrically and overlapping as in all crossjaws, so that what were once the side pairs now line up with the upper and lower pairs, respectively, forming two sets of pseudo-jaws. Those of this species exhibit especially long, backwards-curving keratin teeth and a very prominent notch in the upper pair, which serve to increase their grip on wet, struggling animals as they pull them out of the water. Most of the diet is fish, but they are opportunistic and will tackle most any swimming animal that comes their way, even ones rivaling their own size, including wheliphants and the black swump. With very powerful pesudo-jaws that flex around the body of prey and can interlock at their distal edges, the aquatic crossjaw uses all of its weight to push down and drown these especially huge victims, while smaller ones are more simply pulled onto land and dismembered with fierce slashing bites. The aquatic crossjaw is a strong swimmer and a capable diver; its feet are webbed, and it can even swim considerable distance below the surface, surprising prey from behind and driving it to its death by cornering it against the shore.

An ambush predator, this crossjaw favors calm forested shoreline where it can hide partially submerged among dense reeds and mangroves and then pounce on prey that strays too close. To nest, however, the female will travel to dunes along the western shore of the lake, laying their eggs in carefully tended sand heaps and adding and removing sand to maintain a steady, warm temperature for their incubation. During this time the female, who must stay with and tend her eggs at all times, is reliant on the male to hunt and provide her with food; the social structure of this species is based on polyandry, and every reproductive, territory-holding adult female - which is about 1/3 heavier than the male - has at least two and sometimes up to four attending male partners which comprise her pack. Such a female, who by merit of age and strength has driven off all rivals from her territory, may then spend most of each year nesting while having to hunt very little on her own; as each clutch of eggs hatches, she sends the chicks off with one of her attendants who may or may not be their biological parent, and the male will raise them with little further aid from her. Males within a group have their own social hierarchy, but there is much indiscretion, as females will have their own preferences independent of which male is technically most dominant, and subordinate males will sneak around and breed unbeknownst to the others with regularity.

Though these animals are social within their bonded groups, they are hostile to outside groups; even males will fight against males of rival packs, though their conflicts are largely ritualized. Females, however, fight to the death and are uncaring cannibals to the losers. Male groups are usually related in some way, often siblings or half-siblings, and their bonds, though occasionally tested, tend to be lifelong. Most male groups will attend several females over a lifetime, as females will fight and displace each other; few reign for more than a few years, and a decade-long reproductive reign is exceptionally successful. Young females that lack harems and old, vanquished females that have lost them are solitary and transient, hunting in less than favorable locations away from reproductive females, or for the younger, sometimes sneaking around behind their backs when the residents are occupied nesting. Such territory invaders, though they would be killed by the resident female if she found them, can often gain the tolerance of the local males - and even gain free food from them - by mating with them, even though without a territory of her own she will not lay any resulting eggs, and thus this is purely a social ploy to improve her own odds of finding food. It's a clever way to manipulate the social behavior of other crossjaws. But even this reigning ruler of the salt lake cannot match the social complexity of our next species.

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The duneloon is a medium-sized fishing aukvulture with a 20 foot wingspan, descended from the stormshadow, which is native to coastal Serinaustra and the Great Blue Salt Lake. Though this widespread species is a far-ranging oceanic forager and occurs across the shallow seas north of the continent, the species is wholly dependent on the saltspray sandhills dune system, west of the salt lake, to nest. Here they gather in their tens of thousands during breeding years, which do not happen annually, but can be as rare as twice a decade. These birds are the closest living relative of the Serinarctan seinebill, and resemble the animal from which that more physically specialized species evolved. Though the duneloon looks less derived, and feeds in wider ways, it has a much more behaviorally specialized life history than almost any other archangel.

Duneloons feed on fish and small snarks, hunting in saltwater environments up to 300 miles from shore, but being unable to sleep on the wing or suited to prolonged rests on the water, they must return to dry land to rest, which limits their range. The tips of their beaks feature long, interlocking pseudoteeth, which function like a net to enclose small baitfish. Foraging methods are variable and include a combination of in-flight skim-feeding in prey-rich locations, especially where fish have been congregated in dense numbers by the actions of aquatic predators, and by floating on the water's surface and making short dives to catch larger fish actively. Unlike their stormshadow ancestor, duneloons don't regularly feed on land; with the recovery of fish stocks in the later hothouse, they have returned to a life dependent on the ocean.

The duneloon is one of only a very few giant aukvultures with notable sexual dimorphism of plumage. Males have green head feathers with a yellow stripe on the cheek, while females are mostly white with dark feathers only in front of their eyes. This reflects a lack of sexual fidelity, with males courting many females. But the duneloon is not a deadbeat dad - this species is polygamous, and the male performs a great deal of childcare. During nesting seasons, as many as 60,000 duneloons - nearly the entire adult population - descend on the saltspay sandhills to court and nest, which they do in a way unlike any other aukvulture, and which they do nowhere else on Serina.

The nesting strategy employed by the duneloon is ingenious, and relies on using the warm sand dunes to incubate their eggs, rather than brooding them. This behavior arose from an earlier species that constructed sand mounds in coastal regions in which to lay their pupal sacs - which are functionally soft-shelled eggs, in which the pupating larva develop, using up energy in their own tails to grow as other birds use an egg yolk - on top of to protect them from flooding from hurricanes. This is a strategy that is still used by the seinebill in the mirror biome at the top of the world, the hyperborean raindesert. The duneloon has altered their behavior, for their nest site in interior Serinaustra is not subject to hurricanes, and it is not necessary for a parent to protect the 'eggs' from storms, meaning that they can be incubated by the heat of the sand alone. The male does all of the work to tend the 'eggs' in this species, with females selecting a mate largely based on how well he defends his patch of sand dune from competing males and from predators.  Because females don't have to sit on their own young to warm them, they can continue feeding during the nesting season, and so can produce more 'eggs' than if they had to fast and incubate them. Females lay their 'eggs' on top of the dune, and it is the male's duty to then bury them, which he does with remarkable organization in an outwardly-extending spiral pattern just below the sand's surface, so as to maximize how many he can fit in a small space. In total, as many as 100 developing young, each safe in its own small cocoon, can be left in his care. The male constantly turns the sand, and turns each pupa as needed to maintain the proper temperature. If the sun gets too hot, he buries them deeper in the dune, and if they chill, he brushes some of the sand away.

The nesting season of the duneloon is very prolonged, lasting over 120 days, for different 'egg' clutches hatch at staggered times depending on when they were laid. A single male would simply not be able to endure such a long time without leaving his young unprotected in order to feed, and risking they get too hot, too cold, or get eaten by other animals. But the duneloon male is not, actually, a solitary parent. Though while the young develop, their mothers are out feeding themselves, every successful breeding male has assistance from another male. Duneloon males are, in fact, socially monogamous - and always with a member of their own sex. This unusual strategy has evolved for practical reasons: during nesting years, there is a limited number of suitable sites in which to raise their young, and if every single male controlled its own spot, it would simply be too crowded. Such males would likely spend all of their time fighting for space, risking their 'eggs' being neglected or broken, and reproductive success would be poor. So early in their adult lives, two males which find each other compatible form pair bonds, and then aid one another in defending a shared nest from any other males outside their bond. Visiting females mate with both of them, a strategy that is more to ensure each believes it to be the father of her young than a behavior coming from any sense of being fair. Each male then takes a shift tending the nest lasting around 24 hours before its partner returns, and the two trade off.

As different 'egg' clutches hatch, they do so synchronously. Like most aukvultures, they can fly from within a few hours of hatching and are able to feed themselves, so they soon leave the males and form large flocks of their own age group feeding along the shore of the salt lake. Yet these young are not entirely left alone; the females, which have been waiting for them to arrive and staying nearby on the salt lake, now come to collect their broods, which - astonishingly - seem able to recognize the voice of their own mother, having imprinted on her specific calls in the short time span while still pupating, as their 'eggs' were laid and left on the dune. The window for this imprinting is extremely brief, limited to just a few hours after birth, and they do not imprint on the male's voices, for the male and female have distinctly different calls, and the chicks instinctively recognize only the higher-pitched female chirps for this purpose. Flocks of chicks find their own parent and then stick close to her, following her to the ocean coast, where they will spend the next few years of their lives growing. When the time comes to breed, up to 10 years later, they will recall the way back to the salt lake from this single trip made behind their mother. When at last the final chicks have fledged, males too will return to the sea. Bonded pairs stay together, while females have no strong social bonds. The two sexes spend most of their times in different social groups thereafter, with females flocking with one another in large numbers, while males are less tolerant of others outside their mate, and usually travel in groups of just two.

Duneloons only breed every few years because the density of their nesting flocks depletes the fish stocks of the salt lake to such a degree that it would not be able to recover in a single year. Even though females do not spend the entire duration at the nest site, for at least a month and a half, virtually all living duneloons are gathered there, and all of them must find food for themselves. This is why the young are led back to the sea as soon as they are fledged, for by the time the nesting season is done, there would be little left for them to eat if they stayed. The lake's ecology is notably affected for several years following a duneloon breeding cycle; after an initial depletion of fish and small marine life, the nutrients left behind by the birds in the form of their droppings results in a surge of new plant and animal life, resulting in periodic booms and busts in the populations of many salt lake organisms.

~~~

Though they could not look or act less alike, the next species we see is also an archangel, and its ancestors once resembled the duneloon. This is the saltshooter, a small giraffowl of Serinaustra, closely related to the crownprinces and the capricoxes, and like them flightless at all life stages. It has evolved a very remarkable and deadly defense that could only have occurred in this unusual biome. Saltshooters evolved to live in the sand dunes around the great blue salt lake to avoid competitors in more lushly forested nearby areas. This southern raindesert, though no more arid than its northern counterpart along the freshwater polar basin, has far less plant life, for as the wind blows its sand up from the shore of the nearby water, it carries with it its salt as well, and this is quite hostile to plant life in general. The plants which do survive here are therefore specialized to the conditions and cannot grow outside the dunes any more than forest vegetation can grow on the salt-licked sand hills. These plants excrete sodium as they are able, often through pores in their leaves and stems, and animals which eat them must then find their own ways to excrete the excess they quickly acquire on such a diet. The saltshooter evolved from a lineage of giraffowls that dissipated their salt intake through a large gland between their eyes and nostrils, and so could feed freely on vegetation that, in large amounts, could be toxic to other species.

But the plants of the saltspray sand dunes don't all rely only on sodium chloride to deter grazing. Just as the flameflowers of the northern raindesert acquired toxic chemical defenses, so too have some here in the south. A genus of short, bushy legumes descended from clovers grow here in abundance. Called chokepeas, they are unremarkable to look at, but are among the most common plants of this habitat, and they have evolved to process abundant environmental sodium chloride into a far deadlier compound by concentrating flourine from their environment into their own tissues, where - as an unstable and highly reactive element - it immediately combines with the abundant salt. Sodium fluoracetate, which results, is highly poisonous to some, but not all animals. Most insects, many tribbetheres, and some mostly carnivorous birds are severely affected by this defense, and can suffer fatal reactions to even a very small oral dosage. As the compound is metabolized in an animal's body, it widely disrupts cell metabolism, so that victims of its poisoning often die of heart failure after prolonged severe abdominal pain, vomiting and seizures. But herbivorous birds are tolerant of this defense, giraffowl particularly, and saltshooters most of all (burdles, however, have very low resistance, and these plants likely evolved to defend against them, particular the seed-eating murds.) Rather than immediately metabolize the compounds out of their bodies, these giraffowl instead store it for later. The immunity naturally shown by the saltshooter to its toxic diet has, over time, combined with its acquisition of salt-expelling nasal glands to produce something never before seen: poisonous sneezes, used defensively.

Saltshooters get their name for their frightening ability to shoot toxic, concentrated brine solution containing sodium flouracetate into the eyes, nose and mouth of would-be predators, turning the tables and poisoning its enemies. They move across the dunes in small herds, bounding up one hill and down another on wide-splayed toes, keeping in touch with soft bleating calls. Their young, like those of their relatives, are born in small numbers and are flightless, and they stick close by their mothers. When danger threatens, they don't run, but turn to face it. A crest of vibrant red and black feathers is erected around their heads whenever they are alarmed, and their soft vocalizations become a disorienting, high-pitched, buzzing chatter: a warning just before they shoot. Their aim is extremely accurate, and they can project their snot for distances of over 20 feet by building pressure in a large, bulbous hollow sinus crest before opening their nostrils and expelling the brine stored within. Their weapon, if it hits the mucous membrane of a carnivorous scrounger, a foxtrotter, or a rhynchodon aukvulture, will induce immediate symptoms of poisoning and crumple the attacker in pain, letting the herd swiftly make their escape. It takes several weeks to fully refill an emptied crest of brine, but saltshooters live in groups to ensure that no one individual ever uses all its supply; it takes just one to protect the herd from danger. Only a few potential predators of the saltshooter are also resistant to its shots: it is ineffective against the formidable adactus, for this fierce omnivorous foxtrotter has too acquired resistance to many plant defenses in its diet, and this animal often ambushes and kills the saltshooter when it seeks out pools of water from which to drink. The sharpshooter is now able to drink seawater, a side-effect of its salt-removing adaptations, but prefers freshwater whenever available. In either place it can be surprised by this unassuming worst enemy, dragged below the surface, and taken away. If only in its ability to control the population of such species as this, which have otherwise few limits, the adactus thus serves a purpose here too, however brutal it may be.

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The keythonet is a charismatic, distinctive skueasel native to the saltspray sandhills. It is the smallest skuorc usually referred to as a griffon, for though it is only about seven pounds and only shin-high, it has very prominent ear-like feather tufts on its head which give a strong resemblance to larger species like the draguar, to which it is related. Both of these species, as well as the sea skueasel, share a common ancestor around 282 million years PE which developed feather crests on the face. But only in the keythonet's genus, which it shares with several other small related species, have these tufts taken on a functional role besides display. The plumes are stiff and held closely together, and can be angled forward or backward with small muscles at the base of each quill. They have become a simple approximation to the external ears of tribbetheres, and represent the second , independent instance of feather tufts taking on this role in skuorcs - it is seen also in the drackals, to which griffons are not near-relatives. While this is convergent evolution, the structure of the ancestral skuorc's ear, which were lined internally with very small bristle-like plumes that may have aided in keeping water out when diving, may have left its descendant's predisposed to acquire similar sound-amplifying traits. 

Keythonets are terrestrial skueasels, but come from semi-aquatic ancestors which began foraging inland again some 5 million years ago. They are the most basal of their genus, despite already appearing very derived, and it is here in the raindesert that their lineage became land-dwellers again, taking advantage of the expansive sand dunes which had formed nearby the large saltwater lake in which their immediate ancestors hunted for small aquatic prey. They are now nocturnal animals which do not swim except in dire circumstance; to avoid the heat of the day on the sand dunes they retreat into burrows in thickets of vegetation; their acute hearing benefits them in uncovering small, scurrying prey in the dark of night. They are mostly solitary, but not entirely, sometimes sharing a den with one to three close relatives or, for short durations, with a mate, but hunting is always a solitary affair. Invertebrates dominate the diet, but small murds and other burdles are also significant. The jaws are narrow and sharp, well-adapted to strike smaller animals and quickly break open their exoskeletons - or dislocate spinal cords - with the gravedigger-like tooth cusp on either side of the top mandible. The feet have become feathered down to the claws, a trait that prevents burns from hot sand and silences their steps, as well as helps distribute their weight on loose substrate to increase their speed. All through the night they wander at a steady pace, dashing between patches of cover, stalking and pouncing small prey. When dawn breaks, they hurry home; females with chicks in the den will carry home many small animals lined up in a row along the entire length of their jaws, each held by the neck or, in the case of athropods, sometimes by a single leg. Keythonets rarely drink water; earlier adaptations to endure living in saltwater are retained, a rare example of exaptation of traits useful in aquatic settings to a very different desert-like environment. They have very efficient kidneys and thus the ability to survive on scant moisture contained within their food.

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Dainty birds weighing just six to sixteen ounces, sandsnatches are the smallest of all hothouse archangels, miniature distant cousins of the duneloon and saltshooter and somewhat closer ones to the duowhit. They are diminutive descendants of the sandpiping seraph, which opposite of the shoresnatch lineage became smaller throughout the hothouse, rather than growing large like the hellicans. They thrived on diets of invertebrates while those relatives grew big enough to swallow even thorngrazers in their massive maws, and though they are featherweights comparatively, they vastly outnumber their fierce and predatory distant relatives. There are some 120 species of sandsnatches across the world, and some of them gather in flocks of several million. They are among Serina's most numerous birds, and they occur in almost every land biome from sandy seacoasts to wetlands, and from open grasslands to the depths of the night forest. Most species, though, favor open habitats. For the striding sandsnatch of Serinaustra, raindeserts fit the fill.

The striding sandsnatch is a dimorphic species weighing half a pound. Females are tan, their pale, dusty feathers matching the sandy backdrop of the saltspray sandhills, where they breed annually within vegetated dunes overlooking the great blue salt lake. Males, however, undergo a transformation just after the flocks arrive on these dunes in preparation to nest, and undergo a dramatic molt, decorated with a bright black mask, grey-blue plumage on the wings, a reddish breast, and a long white frill of plumes around the neck which can be raised around the face in a tremendous display, like the petals of some strange avian flower. As they descend on the sandhills - in the austral autumn, a time when few birds are nesting - the males strut and stride, whistling high-pitched melodies as they flare their feathers against each other and compete for female attention. When the hens arrive a few weeks after the males and just as their plumage attains its peak development, the males dial up their display even more; now they flutter high into the air at dawn and at dusk, spiraling downwards in a circling glide, with their ruffs trailing above and behind them in the air. Seasonal pairs soon form, and the flocks disperse over the dunes as the hens fall pregnant, to quietly lay small clutches of their pupal "eggs" in the coming weeks in sheltered thickets of dune grasses. The males, by this time, have gone their own ways and joined bachelor flocks. The mating season over, they soon shed their ruffs until next year; all aggression between them is now forgotten, and they forage across the dunes together in small flocks for protection from predators. The female, alone, hatches her young, which will stay with her for a relatively long time after emerging.

For around 2 months, the mother sandsnatch will protect her chicks, for even though they can fly from infancy, they are vulnerable to countless predators. She leads them through the dunes, both on foot and in the air, and shows them how to find food by probing their long bills into the stems; their nostrils are far down the beak, unusual for a seraph, and their sense of smell is strong. They can detect insects feeding on the grass's roots, and uncover them by kicking the loose sand up at the base of grass tussocks, doing so while standing on their hind legs alone - one of few seraphs to habitually do so outside the aukvulture clade. Grubs, the larvae of beetles, are their preferred food, and once they have loosened the sand, they dart their beaks in and catch them in the tips of their bills, which are uniquely hooked into a pincer-like, overlapping arrangement that prevents their escape as they are hauled into the light, and then thrown back into the mouth and swallowed whole. Their feeding is fast and efficient, and though the mother initially feeds about half of her catches to her gaggle of chicks, they quickly become proficient at the trick on their own, and spend less and less time close by her. By ten weeks old, they are independent and fly off on their own, joining flocks of others. When the last has gone, the female too rejoins her own kind. Soon, the migration will begin again, and she must be ready.

Striding sandsnatchers are highly migratory birds, and the saltspray sandhills are not their yea-round home. They come here to nest, for the climate is mild, food is easy to find, but there are relatively few predators. Once their young are strong, the entire population flies north, to the hyperborean raindesert nearly a world's length away, just in time for the polar winter. Having spent the southern winter there, they arrive shortly before the polar night descends on the north pole in its own autumn. Now they become nocturnal, and their large eyes - a vibrant violet color by day - are now overtaken by huge pupils that catch all available light. Flocks spend the northern winter here, feeding on the abundant insects that emerge in this shadowed season, but also avoiding many more predators than ever threatened them in their southern refuge; this is not a safe place to nest, but it is a feast for those who can stay alert and avoid the dangers. Only once the length of the spring day overtakes the length of the night will the flocks begin to fly south again - by then, last year's young are already mature, and the cycle of life and the seasons will begin again. Males leave first, so as to be ready with their breeding plumage by the females' arrival. And life goes on, as it does for all creatures, each species with its own story not quite like any other.

~~~

Scansorial scroungers, a clade of generally arboreal tentacle birds endemic to Serinaustra, include some of the most derived birds ever to live. All rhyncheirids, or "tentacle birds", have historically been strange. Their ancient development of facial appendages, and the evolution of new muscles to power them, has allowed them to acquire some of the most distinct new shapes not just of birds, but of any vertebrate animals on land. Several only very distantly related branches of this clade of birds have so highly modified their anatomy so as to add additional sets of jaws to their face, obscuring their true beaks beneath new mouthparts derived from facial tentacles, which themselves originated from small sensory feelers on their distant aquatic ancestor, the water snuffle, which had a sheathe of sensitive skin over most of its bill. Arguably the most extreme pseudo-jaws evolved in the now-extinct gloves, whose tentacles were supported by bones and lined with deadly keratin teeth - and a few living scroungers, like the crossjaws, have independently acquired similar adaptations. But they are not the only tentacle birds with extremely hard-to-parse faces. Phantasmal scroungers - a subset of scansorial ones which are related to the kaks - adapted their tentacles dramatically not for function, but for beauty; they are a clade which evolved a truly bizarre look for display, more than for practicality. And yet, even among these weirdest of birds, one species has found a more pragmatic use for its weird face.

The purple prancer is a bird with such a strange face shape, it has become almost incomprehensible. Its true beak is almost invisible, a tiny thing totally surrounded by fleshy musculature tentacles; as in kaks, the top and bottom align as a new set of jaws, but here are relatively weak and lack bone support; they are adapted to grab and tear open small fruit, and to come together with a hollow space between them, forming a straw through which nectar and juice can be sucked into the mouth, and they do not need to be especially strong or sturdy to feed in these ways. The left and right tentacles though are extremely long and thin, as in other phantasmal scroungers, and would have originally acquired their shape for purpose of social communication and attracting a mate. Purple prancers, like most of their relatives, evolved in trees and have arboreal adaptations; their feet are very dexterous, with long grasping toes and opposing halluxes, letting them perch and jump from branch to branch. They are tiny, weighing just 12 ounces, and so can withstand even long falls if they miss their mark, simply scurrying back upwards along the tree trunk; the tentacles of the prancer have along their length several small barbed hooks which serves as clamp-ons for just this purpose, aiding it in ascending branches in addition to the hind legs. But purple prancers, which are found in only a narrow range of tropical forest along the shore of the great blue salt lake, have also a fondness for visiting the ground. It is a dangerous place, but also one of bounty, for those bold and brave enough to explore it.

Purple prancers often descend from their treetop habitat at dusk, moving over the sandy beaches of the lake with fast bounding locomotion much like a lemur, their splayed toes supporting them over the loose sand. They gather near the lapping edge of the water, on nights when the wind is calm and the waves just quiet ripples, and they wait, eager in anticipation. Soon insects will emerge from the surf; salt flies, small species in their countless swarms, which have grown up as larvae eating detritus by the tide-line and now are ready to take flight as winged adults. They rise like clouds of vapor from the shallows of the lake, and now the prancers take 'flight', skipping along the shallows with graceful jumps up to 4 feet in the air, waving their paired tentacles with frantic motion. Lobes along their length are divided into fine, comb-like structures, each lined with almost microscopic curled hairs which grab onto the fine setae, or 'hair' of the flies, and hold them tight like velcro. In this way, the prancers collect an abundance of nutritious animal protein in just a few sweeps, supplementing their otherwise plant-based diet with a surge of calories, which allows them to exist here in a much higher population density than related species do in other parts of the forest. Several thousand prancers may gather together on the calmest evenings, swarming to catch their food for just a few minutes before the insects have risen out of reach. Once the feast is over, they depart as quickly as they arrived, before predators can spot them. It is a spectacle like no other on Serina, starring a beast with a face like no other.

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From a non-flying dune bird to a flying dune not-bird, the next animal we visit is of a very new lineage, one which has only appeared in the late hothouse. In the saltspray sandhills there lives just one of many rapidly diversifying descendant species of the flittering flutterfox. The fidowl is one of the first to explore terrestrial lifestyles, having already moved down from jungle trees to the ground of this small, sandy raindesert. The very close proximity of the desert to the jungle has likely eased this jump, as forest dwelling predators learn to make quick ventures out of the shadows to take advantage of relatively exposed prey animals scurrying from isolated patches of cover. This has led the 18 inch tall fidowl to a niche of hunting mainly on the ground. Now this flighted foxtrotter, whose ancestors once leapt through trees, jumps around the dunes on a long hind leg, balancing with flutters of its wings, pouncing swiftly on desert arthropods and small murds; death from above, on a very small scale. When its own enemies threaten, a sudden flurry of its wings vaults it high into the air and out of danger; it has not lost any of its recently gained power of flight, only repurposed it. Fidowls are 90% carnivorous, rounding out their flesh diet mainly with seeds and very rarely a nibble of greenery. The range of animal prey taken is very wide, and includes fish in addition to land animals, with the animals often hunting along the edge of the salt lake and wading several inches deep when the waters are calm. Fidowls cannot drink saltwater, of course, and to hydrate as well as clean the salt residue from their fur, they make daily visits to freshwater ponds which form in depressions between the largest dunes, to drink and to wash up.

The fidowl is primarily nocturnal, though not exclusively, and has keen night vision at some expense of color perception; this is of little concern to it, as even its own plumage has dulled from the blue hues of its ancestor, now tawny and speckled, to hide it against sand and dune vegetation. Large ears pick up every little sound of every little animal scuttling in the grass, and this small but fierce hunter can pinpoint the location of its quarry even when it cannot see it, much like a moonbeast, which it and other flutterfoxes have come to resemble. Yet if a moonbeast is alike a mixture of cat and owl, then the fidowl is a dog and an owl. Unlike its very distant tribbat kin, the fidowl is very gregarious and always lives in small packs. Males and females cooperatively rear large litters of up to six young, and older offspring stick around and assist in mothering younger litters in order to learn parental skills. Up to twelve fidowls may share a den, dug into a vegetated dune where the roots hold their tunnels from caving in, and at dawn and dusk especially the many members of the pack may be seen peering out of the burrow, checking their surroundings in preparation of flying off to hunt. One or two adults always stays with the pups, guarding them from nest-raiders, and these babysitters are fed by the hunters along with the young once they return. Pups greet returning adults with eager chirping calls as they beg for regurgitated food; these calls become shrill, yappy barks as they grow to adulthood - the species is very vocal. They fledge around three months of age, are independent hunters by five months, and usually leave the group and find a mate of their own at one year of age. 

Flying flutterfoxes are such a new lineage that behavioral and habitat differences primarily induce speciation, while all species are very much able to interbreed. Most species exist as clines, blurring at the boundaries where one population blends into another, and this is true even for the fidowl, one of the most derived species of its genus. Though "true" fidowls of the desert are very distinctive from less derived flittering flutterfoxes of the jungle, the two meet along the forest's edge and may still couple, easily communicating with one another. Yet any offspring born have reduced fitness, as they are neither well-suited for a forest or a desert habitat and stand out in both. Flutterfox species are rapidly evolving to be different from one another worldwide, but only where different populations adapt to very dissimilar environments. Wherever hybrids can survive as well as their parent species, such as hybrids born from two forest-dwelling subspecies, their speciation is stalled, and the population remains intermixed. But as jungle flutterfoxes and desert ones can no longer thrive in the other's habitat, they have quickly become very different in form and behavior.

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Last but far from least, we leave our overview of these closely-intertwined biomes with one of its most impressive predators. The makara is a species of swampstalker. It is the largest carnivore of the dunes, and is the match to aquatic crossjaw of the lake itself as a top predator. Though it is impressively large, reaching up to 20 feet long and five feet high at the head, it has a very small range, and is endemic to the great blue salt lake and surrounding regions within roughly 50 miles of its shores, particularly favoring sand dune areas. It is notable for the shift it undergoes from an aquatic juvenile to a terrestrial adult. Young makara closely resemble their ancestor, the spectacled swampstalker, and are streamlined swimmers which hunt mostly aquatic prey. Around their tenth year of life, they undergo a transformation and move inland. Their skin grows much thicker, and adults develop horn-like protuberances across the snout and a thick keratinized wattle on the throat, both adaptations which may make it harder for other makaras - or captured prey - to bite their vital areas in conflict.

Makaras are ambush predators at all life stages, but while young snatch fish and waterbirds, adults are one of few animals which can bring down even adult giraffowl. They have evolved to prey on jungle animals which visit the salt lake to replenish their mineral requirements, for sodium is scarce in the rainforest surrounding the lake. They hide themselves in loose sand and scrubby vegetation between the lake and jungle, their rough skin resembling rocks or logs, especially when mostly covered. When an animal comes near enough, this hunter launches itself upward and bounds after its target in a short but speedy chase. Its limbs are erect as an adult, transitioning over time from a sprawling condition in the young, and it can sustain a speed of up to 20 miles per hour for as long as two minutes, letting it catch up to its target, snatch a leg in its enormous jaws, and bring it toppling down.

Though young and old makara have different lifestyles, the adults still provide care to their young for the first few months of their lives. Very rarely for any skuorc, makara form pair bonds, and not only do mated couples share territory - even amicably sharing food resources - and defend it from rivals as a unit, but they also cooperatively rear their young. Females return to the lake to give birth, but afterwards leave, with the male - slightly smaller than his mate, and more colorful - attending them. He stays in the shallows with his brood, guarding them, regurgitating meat for them, and keeping them from straying to the depths - he is not a fast swimmer, but is still capable when needed. The female returns within a few days and the two switch out, with her now providing food and attention to the chicks. The pair continue to alternately hunt and rear the young for at least half a year, by which time the little ones are capable of hunting and avoiding danger on their own, and will need to move into deeper waters where their elders can no longer follow. Most pairs will breed only in alternate years.

Though some adult makaras wander far from the lake, they don't breed in other places. This is due to the reliance of the young on seawater, to which they have become highly adapted living here for millions of years. Both the makara and the salt swampstalker, its smaller sister species still living here, have evolved to conserve water extremely efficiently large kidneys that filter their urine with the efficiency of a desert animal to prevent water loss. Young living in freshwater can now develop skin lesions within two days and can die in just five days from excessive hydration, leading to a crash in the electrolytes in their blood and ultimately failure of vital organs. While the traits they've acquired to conserve water benefit them and allow them to survive in saline conditions, they now prevent them from living in other inland habitats. Why the makara also fails to colonize coastal sea shores may be related to the long period of dependence the young have not just on their parents, but in very calm, very shallow nursery waters which are not usually found along the storm-battered sea coast.