Life's Changing Seasons: Return to The Nightforest

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Many species of the nightforest can be viewed in the earlier page exploring the biome linked in this sentence, and in greater detail further down this page, but some which appear above do not have more in-depth descriptions - perhaps because close relatives have already been seen, or because they may also occur in an adjacent biome. Small descriptions of those species follow here:

White-rumped Stoatshrike: small, solitary carnivore gravedigger that dwells in the canopy. Preys on nesting animals, scavenges carrion. Might eat fruit sometimes.

Goldcrested Molmo: This cat-sized molmo lives in pair bonds rather than larger clans at lower forest levels than the slightly smaller red molmo which is a competitor with it that excludes it from dwelling higher in the forest. The two species are otherwise similar.

Woodland Mowerbird: A specialist, uncommon mowerbird (a rarity.) This species feeds its chicks nothing but leaf buds from deciduous trees, and as such comes here in spring to breed, departing by midsummer for more southerly forests. Flocks of adults may eat a wider range of leaves, but their young require the more nutritious buds to grow up healthy. Breeds just once a year, rarely gathers in flocks larger than a few individuals.

Skuascraper: Very large skulossus species designed by Troll Man, a seasonal forest browser and one of the tallest skuorcs. It winters south of the forest in the upperglades.

Slender-snouted sneetcher: A most unusual semi-beaked foxtrotter related to foxhoppers, that feeds on almost nothing except earthworms.

Speckled snoot: Fills a niche like a duiker as a small herbivore-omnivore that slinks around in vegetation, like other snoots it has changed little form its ancestor forms. Lives in pairs or small groups.

Small-spotted skungaru: Tiny little insectivores common to the forest, they nest under tree roots and are fast, flighty, and solitary foragers. Based on leptictidiums.

Parrotbill cygnosaur: A large, semi-solitary cygnosaur distantly related to all other species, characterized by a hooked bill used to snap woody branches, peel bark and crack nuts. Leaves the forest later than other herbivores because its diet is not just leaves. Males live alone but females may group up. They breed here in the fall and give birth to the south where forests are evergreen in winter and babies have more places to hide.

Arctic flutterfox: Northernmost species, has a thicker snout than others and preys not only on insects but also small birds. Resident year-round.

Green chatterjay: one of many non-bogglebird chatterraven descendants, these intelligent birds are like magpies and gather to feed on seeds in the forest in autumn. Widespread over the northern continent.

Transitory Taptracker: a large taptracker close to the ancestor of rasps which feeds like a woodpecker on wood-boring insects. Named for its changing plumage that molts from green in spring to red-orange in autumn and through winter to match its surroundings (red also appears black in the dark.)

Sunset Scarreot: close relative of the red-maned scarreot, adapted to feed during low-light but not total dark; favors twilight conditions. Summers and winters in the flood forest where it is crepuscular but migrates north to feed on autumn nut and seed crops during the prolonged dusk of autumn.

Sicklebill Prowl: close relative of antipodal prowl is not migratory and indeed rarely flies far. Spends both summer and winter in the night forest. Fast runner, not an ambush hunter. Often preys on vertebrates much bigger than the antipodal prowl eats, killing with its sturdy beak.

Greater Skuggernaut: Designed by troll man, the adult of this skogre skuorc lives in polar basin, juveniles grow up here until large enough to avoid predators there. Baby eats basically anything it finds.

Micro Phony: Small member of a lineage of hillhopper thorngrazers related to but distinct from unicorns. Phonies are usually smaller than unicorns, but not always, and vaguely resemble ponies, but aren't actually ponies. The micro phony is named for its small size, it lives like a muntjac deer. Relatives include Tele Phony (communicates over long distances) and the more horse-like larger Mega Phony.

Arboreal villaingull: A small seabird which feeds and breeds in winter along the polar basin, nesting in nightforest tree holes. Summers on the ocean coast.

Darkvarc: A smaller, arboreal relative of the firmament's varc with a prehensile tail, the darkvarc claws open rotted wood to eat insects living inside.

Verminator: Large wormslayer bumblet designed by Troll Man, more aquatic in summer but hunts on land in the dark. Like a honey badger; aggressive, ravenous, and good at digging out burrowing food sources.

Dependable Lumpus: The most perfect animal of the natural world is always around, for he lives a sedentary life on the forest floor and rarely moves fast or far. Gentle by nature, it eats almost anything, but especially likes insects and fallen fruits. Secretes mildly toxic and very distasteful mucous if disturbed, most animals take one lick, say "blech" and leave him to go on his way. A relative of the porcuplumpus, and also able to inflate itself when under duress. Squishy if you poke it, and might say "merp" if very upset. 

15 More Species of the Nightforest!

The night forest is a biome where life is not just layered with each level of the rising tree canopy, but divided between round-the-clock the summer sun and the long winter dark. Some animals stay year-round, and are adapted to the changes which the year's cycle brings. Other migrate, whether to flee the dreaded clutch of the polar winter and the disappearance of the greenery, or to arrive just in time to exploit the opportunities it brings, such as the profusion of night-flying insects. Only a single species, though, can be said to do both at the same time. It is the antithetical daggerbill, Serina's only bird to migrate both toward and away from the polar forest each spring and again each autumn. This is the only bird where the male and the female each favor an entirely different season, and migrate opposite to the other, meeting for a rendezvous along the way.

The male antithetical daggerbill is a medium-sized bird about the size of a crow. It is very showy, with white plumage contrasted sharply with black and shimmering blue highlights on face, wings, and tail. The beak is a vibrant orange, the eye a stunning sky blue, and the forehead feathers rise into a curling crest that towers over its height. It is diurnal, and it arrives in the north polar just as the sun crests the horizon, after wintering in the southern upperglades where the days shorten, but never vanish entirely. The male is strongly territorial, and as the days lengthen each one begins to scout out tree hollows, using their beaks as pick-axes to enlarge small wounds in rotten old trees until a cavity much larger than their own bodies is created. It does its excavation in secret, leaving only a tiny entrance hole through which it just barely fits, and so its creation is left unnoticed by larger animals which might simply steal it for themselves if they, too, could see it was there. As spring turns to summer, and the nights vanish completely, the male shifts his focus from building to stocking. His tree-burrow becomes a pantry, one which he stocks with as much small prey as he can catch. He is an effective hunter, a swift and very fast flier, one which catches molodonts, lumpuses, skurrels, all manner of insects, and many types of smaller flying birds by surprise and impales them on his mandible, carting home as much surplus as he does not need for himself back to his den. He does not simply pile up the corpses, for in the warm, damp climate they would quickly rot and attract rivals. To prolong their shelf life, he dries them in the sun, skewering them on branches in nearby trees here and there - but never all together, and never in his own nest tree - and guarding them from thieves with a keen eye and, if necessary, fierce swoops in which he will happily embed his beak into their eye sockets. He is usually given a wide berth after one or two warnings.

Soon, summer turns to autumn. The days shorten, and a change is in the air. Once the small corpses of his victims have dehydrated enough that they will not immediately turn to mush, the clever male daggerbill switches to the last stage of his process. He now breaks off small, sharp twigs from the tree and pushes them into the softened wood of the nest cavity's walls. Then, carefully poking each of his many stashed, dried out morsels onto each stake, he lines the nest with his prizes, a wallpaper of meat, resembling some macabre museum of taxidermy. Each time he leaves his den now, he hides its entrance with clusters of foliage, especially fragrant herbs which help mask the smell of the meat within with undesirable plant scents which will deter other predators from finding his larder. His time in the night forest is coming to an end - but there is one thing left to do, and it will be the most important thing he has done all summer long. As the days grow to just a few hours long, the females begin to arrive from as far away as the southern savannahs near the equator.

They, unlike their mates, are strictly nocturnal, and though they don't migrate over the seaway to the south pole, they follow the night to the equator, where it comprises half of each day length - enough time for them to hunt and feed themselves well. They are huge in comparison to the male, as large as geese, their colors dark and grey with only subtle blue markings that correspond to the male's vibrant garb. Their arrival to the north, in anticipation of three months of night, is to breed. For a few short weeks, the two very different sexes occur together as the males now court potential mates before winter falls. Females do not particularly care for the color or crest of a male; his markings exist much more to intimidate other males and so stake claim of a nest site than to lure in a mate. All the female really expects of a mate is a very well-constructed place for her to lay her eggs and rear her young, and a large stock of food to support the growth of her larvae. Males sit near their burrows in the trees and call out shrilly, advertising that they have a home available, already pre-stocked with morsels. If one is lucky, a female will alight near him and investigate it. She now expands the nest entrance to accommodate her own body, gnawing at the hole until it crumbles away and reveals his summer's long project. If she is not impressed, the male's hard work may literally be destroyed in an instant; she may eat through his stash and leave him without a backwards glance, everything he worked for for naught, and with no chance to breed this year. As each female checks out his work, a male paces nervously back and forth outside the nest, chirping anxiously until he gets the verdict. A satisfied female, after some time inside the nest rearranging it to her liking, will then invite the male inside to join her with soft hooting calls. Then, in the privacy of the lair, they will mate.

A male will only court one female. A female, though, may mate with more than one male and lay eggs in multiple larders, though only if there are few competing females around, and even then she will devote most of her time guarding only one of these from predators. After mating, the successful males depart for sunnier skies as the females guard their developing young, as autumn ends and the sun soon dips below the horizon for the long dark season. The male's tireless summertime work in providing food for the next generation means that the female can now watch over her young for several weeks without having to leave them unattended to find prey, and she can sustain herself on some of the stored meat as well as she stays at her post. She will only leave once the chicks have pupated, which they do once they've depleted the nest of meat; climbing up the inside of the nest cavity, they dig upwards into the soft heart of the dead tree with their wing claws, and there spin their silk cocoons and metamorphose, safely hidden from predators. They will emerge in late winter, fully-formed fliers that do not closely resemble either parent in their first year of life. They will never meet their mother or father - the male already gone by the time they were born, the female departs after they cocoon and spends the rest of the winter hunting for themselves, so as to pack on enough fat to last them on the long migration south which they will do at the first light of spring, even before the males return. The chicks are long-winged and very agile in the air; their daggers are not well developed at this age, and their first meal is on the winter's abundant flying insects. They too will leave the night forest come spring, departing later than their mothers, once the days grow longer than the nights, and traveling south anywhere from a few hundred to over 2,000 miles away. They begin to acquire the distinct traits of the adult sexes after a year of age, with the males becoming crepuscular and eventually diurnal, and the females remaining nocturnal, which is the ancestral state for daggerbills. While males are mature and begin to breed in their second year, females take four years to be large enough to reproduce, but are also longer lived, as they have fewer natural predators due to their size. The opposing life history of the male and female antithetical daggerbill may have evolved to eliminate competition between both sexes in an environment already very heavy in competitors of other species. By alternating their time in the forest like a time share, they avoid fighting over resources. It is likely that originally both sexes may have differed in plumage but been similar in size, and that the female daggerbill grew larger in order to more easily guard her nest site from predators. Had the male not already adapted to be diurnal, this gradual shift in sizes between the sexes may have itself been sufficient to avoid competition between them, but it would never have occurred without the males becoming diurnal in the first place, for this left them able to prepare nest sites and larders for the female's needs in advance and allow her the opportunity to spend weeks at a time without hunting for herself, where her only job was to keep other animals from harming her young in the nest.

The shadowchaser is another nocturnal chatterraven of the nightforest, but this one is not closely related to the bogglebirds. The only chatterchaser species that makes its home in deep forests instead of the grasslands they evolved upon, this bird avoids competition with similarly long-legged and predatory prowls by hunting in a very different way. It rarely runs far on flat ground and does not hunt large prey. Instead, it stalks methodically, particularly around tree trunks as well as boulders, the walls of ravines that follow rivers, and other steep vertical surfaces, peering upward for a flicker of movement that means something is climbing above. Shadowchasers, you see, mimic prowls - not to fool the prowls themselves, but their prey. Because a prowl is a terrestrial hunter, an animal that is clambering high above the ground is quite safe from it, and will not pay it very much attention: prowls don't generally fly upward to grab their food, only striking down. And that is what the shadowchaser exploits.

A shadowchaser is not a prowl, of course, and can do a most unexpected thing when those little creatures so high above least expect it. It can run vertically upwards, racing up to 30 feet up tree trunks and cliff sides to catch its prey by utter surprise when it is distracted. Lightweight, long legged and with deceptively large, wide wings normally kept tightly folded at its sides, the shadowchaser is an expert wing-assisted incline runner. It flaps its wings rapidly while striding toward and then up the side of a tree, catching the bark with a particularly robust and sickle-claw inner claw on each step that gives it traction as it ascends. Even if a skurrel, molmo or some other small creature reacts to its sudden attack and leaps to another tree, it is not safe; the shadowchaser too is maneuverable, and can jump backwards to land on the side of a different tree, alternately springing between two trunks to leap even higher into the canopy than it could otherwise run. Once ascended it has impeccable balance and can then race across branches and bound with utter ease between them, often cutting off its target's escape by springing ahead of it and blocking its access to a nest or other shelter. The shadowchaser is a highly efficient hunter, to the degree that it may even continue to chase targets when satiated as a sort of sport, occasionally leaving them uneaten, though often storing them in caches throughout the forest to return to at a later time.

Shadowchasers are almost jet black birds, with the only white marking remaining being their upper thighs. But like many other nightforest species, their plumage is iridescent, lending a breathtaking shimmering pattern of green, blue, and violet to the feathers of both sexes when the sunlight of spring returns to the forest, and the time to pick a mate and prepare to nest is upon them. Deceptive and solitary in the dark of winter, in spring shadowchaser couples no longer have the advantage to hide in the shadows and strike suddenly, and so will cooperate to hunt by intentionally exposing themselves as one purposely distracts the prey as the other quietly and swiftly sneaks up behind to ambush it. By midsummer the leaves of the canopy have darkened the forest floor again, and now the female broods a clutch of one to three eggs in a nest often constructed in a ground-level shelter underneath the roots of a large tree, while the male again forages alone for food to share with her. The chicks remain in the nest for about four weeks before beginning to follow the adults; they may however be carried by their parents much earlier than this and relocated to several alternate den sites if threatened, in typical sparrowgull fashion. Families stay together through autumn and again hunt cooperatively until winter when they disperse; some young may stay with their father until the following spring, but only if food is abundant. Most individuals take a different mate each spring, with low rates of monogamy.

The rohit is a seldom-seen loopalope descended from the fanfaloot, endemic now only to very scattered reaches of the nightforest, known for its distinctive branched crest. Like its ancestor it has six nostril openings, but here each one opens from a tine on a branched, antler-like crest. It is a solitary low-browsing animal that lives alone except when mating, and most of the year it wanders in the dismal, shadowed depths of the forest. Here even in midsummer the ground sees only fleeting dapples of light, and it's rare to catch even a glimpse of the rohit before it slips away into the shadows, so attentive is it to the slightest sound or movement. Its large eyes can pick up faint light even in very shadowed conditions, but its ears really provide a window into the dark world around it, acting like funnels to collect every little noise and decipher its meaning - friend, or foe? Its pelage is a rich golden-orange with dark stripes, a coat that might seem conspicuous against the forest backdrop, but it takes advantage of the fact that many nocturnal predators have poor color vision, rendering it a similar shade of grey as the plants and wood and leaf litter all around it.

Only in the very end of winter, when the first reddish rays of sunlight begin to stream into the forest from the distant horizon, do rohits come out of their hiding. Now the males begin to look for a mate. They inflate a large air sac between their crests, and as this filled, the air rises up to fill small air sacs adjacent to each nostril, which then appear to bloom from the "branches" of its crest like orange flower blossoms, revealing dim, rusty colored bioluminescence produced by bacteria that live symbiotically within the warmth of its sinuses. Its crests stay illuminated for just a second, accompanied by a loud reverberating chime. And then they deflate, and the crest goes dark, and the male listens for a reply. Sometimes another male calls in response; if its calls remain distant, it is ignored; simply a neighbor on another territory. If it comes closer, the male will prepare for battle: he may soon face a rival intent to take his spot; such conflict is rare, however, for this is not a confrontational animal. The sound the male rohit really wants to come back to his ears is, of course, the chime of a female interested in what she has heard. Her voice is very soft and high pitched, almost like the clang of a teaspoon on a small glass compared to his that sounds more like a flexing piece of sheet metal, so he must listen very close to detect it. A female will not leave the safety of the thickest glades to come to a male; if she responds, it is up to him to seek her out.

This once worked well enough for the species, and the rohit used to be common here. But now kelpies have learned to intercept them, and often call in the males with stolen voices, and they are teaching their young to do the same. Because of this predator that can shift its behavior individually in ways many other species take many generations to do, this is now a species that is endangered. The hothouse is coming to a close, and the animals that will fare best in the times to come are likely to be those which are bolder and able to adopt new, innovative ways to survive, while timid specialists like the rohit - dependent on dense forests, and with behaviors easily exploited by more clever creatures - may find themselves in dire straits before most others. The rise of new, sneaking threats like the kelpie is indeed only the beginning of larger changes to come.

The tree peryton is the only representative of its genus and differs significantly from all other perytons. It is the northernmost species, and today is separated from all others by a distance of around a thousand miles. While most perytons are cliff-dwelling inhabitants of sky islands, tree perytons are arboreal. Their front toes are opposable and can wrap inwards around tree branches, and the hoof-like claws that cover the ends of their fingers are curved so as to be useful to grasp and climb, rather than balance on narrow surfaces. The hind toes are also elongated for perching, and the tarsometarsus of the foot is shortened.

Tree perytons are up to 90% frugivorous, and fruits are the majority of their diet. They can travel widely to reach them as different trees' crops ripen at any one time, both by climbing through the branches and with short but powerful fluttering flight from one tree to another. While tree perytons are not any more skilled at ground takeoff than their relatives, their competence at climbing means they can quickly scale a tree trunk if they glide too low to the ground, and from there they can again take flight. Ridges on their beaks help to grasp small, round food items without dropping them, and unlike most fruit-eaters like scarreots and molmos, this giraffowl is a fastidious eater and wastes very little. Standing around 2.5 feet high, these animals can weigh up to 25 lbs and when their broad wings are outstretched they can span about four feet - not giant by any means, but substantial enough that they can dominate food sources against mostly smaller competitors and claim good feeding sites.

As in their relatives, only male tree perytons have crests, which in this species are smaller and less branched, an adaptation to avoid getting tangled up in tree branches. Males more than make up for their simpler crests with the most stunning plumage of any peryton, a full-body cloak of brightly iridescent black with shimmers of green and vibrant violet-indigo patches along neck, nares, and wingtips. White chins, eyebrows, and a band on each upper wing covert contrast the dark body feathers as the male calls with a metallic, clattering voice in the high tree trops to claim territory, draw in mottled brown females, and ward off rival males. Unlike other perytons, this species lives in year-round social groups of one male to two to five females and their young. A single pupa is reared in the female's abdominal pouch and once hatched stays close to her for about a year, reaching full maturity in two. Females may stay in their birth group, but males disperse as soon as their adult colors begin to come in and the troop leader grows hostile toward them. Males compete for access to harems with calls and posturing and occasionally physical battle, and each male is only likely to hold onto his claim for one to three years before he is defeated by a rival, which mostly prevents inbreeding, as a father is less likely to still be the dominant male at the time any of his young daughters born in the troop reach adulthood.

The cobalt knaven is a species of villaingull adapted to a diving lifestyle, with a twist. Its ancestors were seabirds, some of which specialized toward diving by the mid hothouse, while others - to which it is only distantly related - only grew larger and remained generalists, albeit highly aggressive ones. These diving species never became pelagic, as tribbfishers were more competitive on open water. Instead they remained near coasts, specializing into hunters which dive down onto prey not from the air but from a perch. Like oversized kingfishers, this group of birds has now spread worldwide and can be founds along sea coasts as well as far inland. But not all of them are reliant on water anymore at all; knavens are completely terrestrial. Though they maintain their perching and diving behavior to catch food, they now do so in forests, plunging down through the canopy to strike prey which includes small molodonts, burdles, and flying birds just as their relatives catch fish.

The cobalt knaven, about as big as a raven but with short, maneuverable wings and a much larger beak, are inhabitants of the night forest where they navigate even in darkness with large, light-sensitive eyes. In the sunlit canopy where they hunt from during summer, their plumage shimmers brightly with contrasted white, blue and green hues and iridescent sparkle, but as they drop down into the forest in pursuit of food, their colors dull and they vanish into dappled light and shadow, their barred plumage resembling so many dark sticks projecting out into patches of sunlight. Bright colors exist only to signal others of the same species during the summer breeding season; they appear nearly invisible when the polar night blankets the entire forest in winter, rendering their appearance an easily hidden mix of black and grey.

Cobalt knavens are social but hunt singly, together traveling a territory that no one individual could control on its own. They hunt by sitting motionless from high perches with a clear downward vantage, then plummeting straight down at high speed like a bullet when they spot prey within range. Only the beak is used to kill, for it is robust and spear-like; the feet are small and weak, but with the bill they can strike animals almost their own size as if it were a mallet to dispatch them, or snatch small, faster prey between both mandibles like tweezers. Depending on prey size, it can be dismembered and eaten in small bites or swallowed whole; smaller prey is favored, as it can be carried back up into the canopy to eat, while larger carcasses may be taken by scavengers before the animal can finish eating. The knaven's wings are short and blunt and its flight is relatively slow but very agile, letting it flutter between tightly spaced branches and maneuver complex tangles of vegetation where flight paths are complex and obstructed. Yet in their downward dives they are very swift, using gravity to aid their descent and letting them catch their targets unaware, a sudden death from above. Though a very competent hunter in its own right, the knaven is also an oppurtunist; like other villaingulls, it is an eager thief, and will steal food from other predators whenever possible. The only time that knavens cooperate to hunt, indeed, is when pestering other hunters. As one pulls on tail feathers or otherwise harasses the predator, the second swoops in to steal its prize right from under its nose. 

Flocks of cobalt knavens roost together, as many as ten. They are loud and raucous when at the communal nest site, but silent when hunting; each day when they meet, they seem to have much to say and tell each other about their separate days, and fill the forest with a cacophony of laughter-like calls that carry for some distance. Adults feed the young left behind during the day with whatever they managed to catch, and also share with a single babysitter tasked with watching the nest as others were away. The chicks each take several years to become fully independent and leave their parents to nest on their own, and until then they help raise later litters. An obligate social nester, no fewer than four adults are required to successfully rear a clutch of chicks, born in a tree hollow, and so breeding pairs are usually formed by the dominant sibling in a clutch and at least two younger siblings, in addition to their mate. Social hierarchies are formed early in life through competitive beak-fencing, and the strongest chick usually maintains its position to become the future breeding adult in its group, though it is occasionally challenged for the right, and one of the subordinate siblings will take its place if it dies, often inheriting its mate if they are also opposite sex. Chicks are often very aggressive until hierarchies are thoroughly cemented, and in the first three weeks of life as many as one in four may be killed in these contests; though much larger chicks easily dominate smaller ones and thereafter learn to coexist, same-sized siblings may fight extensively for weeks until one can manage to push their competitor out of the nest to its death. This may be unavoidable, because if two equally strong chicks grew up together, they would not form a stable cooperative breeding coalition at adulthood and would continue to fight, so that neither may successfully breed at all. For the cobalt kaven's social structure to be maintained, both a single dominant and multiple subordinate individuals must occur together. And while as chicks these differences may be entirely the result of size variation, in adulthood when younger birds grow to equal their elders, they are maintained by personality difference; even when physically stronger, subordinates are less confrontational and do not typically challenge their siblings, only taking over breeding roles if they die. They still support the perpetuation of their lineage by aiding their sibling's chicks as a secondary parent, but also exist as a spare, breeding only if the strongest sibling is lost.

Sandscale skurrels are the newest genus to diverge among their gliding-adapted fellows, and these are also the smallest. Yet they have the best defenses against predators like those dreadful daggerbills that love to poke their wicked beaks into the skurrel's safe tree holes and skewer them like kabobs. These skurrels are armored, the contour feathers on their backs evolved into hard, jagged-edged plates that when lain down provide resistance to stabbing blows. When elevated up from the skin, they become weapons of their own, slicing the mouths of attacking animals which find this skurrel is now about as easy to eat as a cactus. Even the once fuzzy down plumage of the skurrel is now modified into threatening, barbed bristles that stick out between the scales and easily break off into in soft tissues around predators' eyes and mouths. Their sharp defenses work well as a last resort, but neither the skurrel nor its would-be enemies usually want to find themselves interacting with the former in the mouth of the other, and to avoid such inconveniences altogether, these animals have evolved a warning that helps predators make the wise choice not to even attempt a bite. Their scales can stridulate together when threatened, producing a very grating noise similar to that of nails scratching a chalkboard. Just one individual is enough to be irritating, but a whole nest is unbearable. Most creatures which peer into a tree hollow and are greeted with the blood-curdling creaking of a nest full of sandscale skurrels will quickly reconsider their choices and move on to an easier meal.

Their defenses, both their noise and their spines and scales, are most effective when a group of sandscales are together and can collectively surround their chicks to protect them. Thus these skuorcs are very social, even more than other flying skurrels, always found in clans of up to 40, which travel as a mob through the trees. Less fearful of enemies than other skurrels, they don't hibernate, remaining active through the sunlit summer months. Not only are they not timid, but they have become aggressive themselves. They use their numbers to intimidate other competitors for food resources like sap flows, even much larger ones, and they leave characteristic trails of destruction on the bark of trees as their groups dig and pick into the wood to find insect larvae. They start their feeding holes using a pick-shaped scale at the ends of their tails, then expand it with their long bills, which open with more force than they close. They need a lot of food to feed so many mouths, and further, their regular feeding in any single tree would eventually kill it, and so these animals must always be on the move. Different clans don't get along, defending a space around themselves rather than actual territories, and producing noxious scent secretions that they flick at one another with their tails to lay claim to any given feeding site as long as they are using it; different groups almost never interact peacefully. As they are always moving, they change their roosts as often as every day, and often usurp the nests of other animals that cannot challenge so many of them. They eat other animal's eggs and young in the process, even of bigger animals, taking them down with one small, sharp bite at a time until a victim is overwhelmed. To other cavity nesters, the sandscale skurrel can be a menace, but if there is any silver lining to its nest thievery, it is that the skurrel will only stay in its stolen roost for one or two days before moving on again. A wise family in residence will take their offspring and run to some temporary abode nearby, returning once the roving delinquents have gone.

Sometimes, though, not even this roving lifestyle of theft and property destruction is enough to sustain the sandscale skurrel and its hoards. Occasionally following booms in the availability of food like nuts or insects that only emerge in swarm cycles many years apart, these skurrels have such a good season that their numbers explode beyond the means of the forest's normal resources to suffice, and super-colonies of over 200 animals may occur. Under normal conditions, juveniles disperse to meet other lone juveniles - or whole clans divide - when they become too big to find enough food, but during plague years they remain together up and until the temporary abundance of food suddenly is depleted. Then, colonies competing for now scarce food begin to fight, and dispersal is prevented by hostile neighboring clans that will kill any individuals that leave the safety of their group. During these times, the sandscale skurrel will adopt alternative methods to try to survive, and its boldness increases to the point that in desperation they will even attack large animals on the forest floor. Descending in a frantic scurrying swarm, they glide down onto thorngrazers, trunkos, and even cygnosaurs and tear at their flesh in rabid, overflowing hunger. That many will be swatted, bitten, crushed and killed no longer matters as long as some can find sustenance, and in this state they lose nearly all of their self-preservation instinct, for they have no other option. Very large animals survive the onslaught but are left racked with scars and wounds as the skurrels pick them open as if they, too, were nothing but moving trees. Smaller animals succumb to their injuries, left tattered and torn. When one is nearing death, multiple clans will join together until as many as 400 animals gather on one animal, and they will skeletonize it in just a few hours. It is ultimately a futile strategy, and one that cannot keep so many of them alive for more than a short time. The more gather in one place, the more their own predators gather to find them. Hunters soon begin picking them off one by one as they are both exposed and no longer coordinating to defend themselves; as they fight amongst themselves over their food, they all make easy targets to others. Plagues of the sandscale last only a couple of weeks before most individuals have died, and those few which remain return to a quieter life back in the canopy. The health of the species as a whole may even benefit from these periodic culls, which break up clans and force the formation of new groups from unrelated former rivals, increasing genetic diversity in a way that would not occur if the rivaling related groups were not occasionally broken up.

The ghost drackal is the smallest of its lineage, weighing just 30 pounds, and is also the only species with no horns above its brows. It is placed in a genus of its own, for though it shares close ancestry to other drackals like the black and the alpine, this species alone has acquired - or perhaps retained - arboreal adaptations. Ghost drackals are skillfull climbers and spend much of their time in the trees of the nightforest and the temperate forests of the Crescent where they are endemic. Nocturnal by preference but active by day during the polar summer, these skuorcs avoid fiercer predators on the forest floor by climbing vertically up trunks with semi-retractable claws and nimbly bounding through the many larger horizontal branches of the forest, ranging from near ground level to the mid levels of the canopy. They are solitary and highly elusive, with excellent hearing as a result of their feather-formed ear pinnae, and so this is a species that is shy, rarely seen, and quick to vanish into the shadows if you ever do spot it, thus earning its name. Though adults never mingle (but are avoidant rather than aggressive), mothers are devoted parents to litters of two or rarely three kits, which spend a full year under their care. Initially hidden in a tree hollow and visited as little as once daily to be fed, the young which are born less mobile at birth than nearly any other skuorc are eventually able to follow their mother through the trees by the age of around 5 months. They will remain in her territory until around one year old, when she will give birth to another litter and drive off her eldest young to find their own territory in the wider world.

This drackal is unusual in several respects, for it is not just arboreal but also exhibits a very specialized bill structure. Ghost drackals are cross-billed, their upper and lower mandibles meeting adjacently rather than the lower slotting into the upper when the mouth is closed, and this is an adaptation toward a very uncommon diet which can be comprised up to 60% of tree seeds, specifically those of the huge tree of heaven which dominates the nightforest canopy, and its near relatives. Molodonts and scarreots in most places can monopolize seed resources, both being highly adapted to deftly crack and consume hard-shelled foods. But the tree of heaven produces especially huge masts of seed, and its nuts individually are not very large, while also being arranged in large quantities in big cone-like pods. When a molodont (and to a much lesser extent a scarreot) feeds on these pods by gnawing them, a lot of the small nuts will simply fall out and be lost.  This is good for the tree, which relies on animals to open the pods and drop seeds down below the parent tree so that their roots can connect and the adult can assist in the young's survival, but this is not so good for the molodont, who needs to crack many such pods to get enough actually into its mouth to be satiated. Not so for the ghost drackal, whose overlapping bill hooks can deftly pry apart each individual scale of the tree's pods, and whose long tongue can catch each seed as it pops out of its holding. These seeds are high in fat and protein, mirroring a diet of animal flesh, and so they are nutritious enough to sustain much of the drackal's dietary needs, even being fed in large amounts to its young. Ghost drackals indeed can rely so well on the tree of heaven and other closely related dancing trees that they can afford to otherwise be very picky eaters. Vertebrate prey, the backbone of other drackal diets, is often ignored in favor of fattier insect larvae, which this hunter can use its same bill shape to pick and chisel out of decomposing trees. Fruit and eggs round out most of the rest of the diet, with less than 5% of what it eats being those back-boned animals themselves.

The tree lumpuses are the most successful of their wider order of non-tribbethere tribbets of the hothouse era, with an estimated 4,000 species found from pole to pole in every terrestrial environment. Indeed, few hothouse lineages have produced so enormous a radiation of forms so rapidly. Yet most of these tribbets are very small, often just an inch or two in length. Most species also spend their lives high above ground, hidden from sight (though despite their name, tree lumpuses can also be found on the ground.) Because of this, they are seldom seen and easily overlooked. This is unfortunate, for they are often behaviorally complex, and males in particular can be highly ornamented, with strong visual adaptations for courting the opposite sex.

Tree lumpuses have a high degree of control over their skin pigments, and most species can adjust their shades to match their backgrounds to camouflage against the environment. The color shifting skill of these animals is especially impressive, for in most forms it is conscious rather than an instinctive response, and this means that the lumpus actively observes its backdrop and adjusts its coloration to match it closely. While most often the level of color change is minor, darkening or lightening to match the surface the animal is sitting on, several species can rapidly fire up entirely different color patterns.

The male twirling tree lumpus of Serina's nightforest is one such skillful artist, painting its normally neutral gray-brown body with vibrant shades of blue, green, red and gold when approached by an interested female. These lizard-like creatures spend their entire lives in the canopy of the night forest's tallest trees, hunting small insects with ambush attacks; their eyes feature specialized, turret-like eyelids which angle their view in any direction, and each eye can focus independent of the other, letting them sit in wait until prey comes within range, then leaping to catch it in their toothy jaws. But their relatively sedentary lifestyle changes when the dark of winter gives rise to the first light of spring. Then, the males gather to lek, each choosing an exposed perch in the treetops from which to display. But before any females arrive, the males must call them in to see the show. They begin emitting rapid sonar-like clicks, produced with snapping movements of hidden pharyngeal jaws in their throats (a second set of jaws which all tribbets once had, but which has since been lost in tribbetheres.) Individually, each calling male produces a barely audible buzzing from any distance, but as more males come in response of the calls, they join in. Within a few days, hundreds of thousands have synchronized their voices, producing a pulsing, deafening cacophony that sounds like rolling ocean waves. Now the females, picking up the vibrations from up to a mile away, begin to arrive. They peruse each male, which stands high when noticed and flashes bright patterns on its side. The males also extend their ear flaps down below their chins, flushing them red with blood, as they begin an intriguing dance. They raise first one arm, then another, and then drop suddenly to one side, to hang below the twig they cling to, and then pull themselves back up the other side. Again and again the males roll this way, twirling around the branches, clicking their songs in unison, as females one by one select their choice - telling a male to approach by changing the color of her throat from grey to blue - and the tribbets couple, a brief and fleeting affair after which the male returns to his post, and the female descends to lower branches.

The mating season is short, lasting just ten to twenty days, though a few lingering males may remain in the vicinity of the lek site for up to a month in hopes of finding a late arriving female. After mating, the female will give birth to a small litter of just two to four young, each about as large as a thumbnail - before parturition, she is noticeably swollen and becomes sedentary, hiding in a tree hole so as not to be captured by predators in her encumbered state. Her young are independent from the moment of birth, and find their own food in the form of tiny arthropods like mites and springtails. She soon leaves them, secure in their hiding place. Though each of her babies is quite small at birth, it is large relative to her own size, and capable of fending for itself. The survival rate of each offspring, carried in pregnancy for up to two months, is thus fairly high, and adults are surprisingly adept at avoiding predators too, able to match their markings exactly to the trees they sit on, and with their eyes always scanning for movement that could mean danger. If threatened, they roll over out of the branch they are sitting on, forming a ball-like shape with their limbs curled under, and bouncing harmlessly to a lower, safe perch thanks to their tiny size which limits their terminal velocity. Such clever survival tricks allow these lumpuses to maintain and grow their populations with just a single breeding season and a handful of offspring per year.

The wood devil is a large vultrorc native to northern Serinarcta's upland regions. Common in the nightforest, it is much less often seen in more eastern floodforest regions, and prefers to hunt on solid, dry ground. Descended from the red devil, it is more compact to better navigate forested habitat rather than plains, and around 1,500 pounds lighter, averaging 3,500 pounds and stretching in excess of 17 feet. Wood devils are solitary predators that stalk prey in shadowed forest understory, pouncing on thorngrazers and small or juvenile cygnosaurs and skulossi, grappling with powerful forearms and bear-like claws but killing with their robust jaws. The snout of the wood devil is much shorter than its fore-bearer's, to be less visible as it stalks through thick vegetation. It is now shaped to deliver most of the bite force into a narrow area at the edge of the beak, and it can still split even the longest bones of its prey to access the marrow within, so that it is a very efficient feeder and can use most of a carcass. Male wood devils have developed horn-like keratin growths on the top of the bill at its base, of the same structure as the tooth-like cutting serrations on the beak, which are used to fight other males along with the spiked tail. Females are territorial too, but less vicious toward each other, and several of their territories may overlap with that of a single male.

Wood devils are obviously predators, but not exclusively, as they will also consume plant foods to pad out their diets, especially fruits and nuts produced occasionally in great excess by forest trees. These animals are adapted to gorging and fasting, feeding gluttonously when food is available in surplus during the summer and autumn seasons, and then going long periods without a meal when prey is scarce throughout the winter. They are not migratory, spending their lives within a single territory, and in late autumn they become lethargic and their metabolism slows. Retreating to a dense thicket, a cave, or some other quiet place, the wood devil will spend most of the winter drifting in and out of a deep sleep, though it does not truly hibernate and will quickly rouse if disturbed - its size and ferocity means it can rest wherever it likes with little worry of being bothered by other forest animals as it slumbers. 

Adult wood devils have no predators of their own, but they do have rivals. Kelpies, an intelligent, sound-mimicking species of unicorn, especially hate them, and will torment them whenever the opportunity permits. The two animals compete for similar food sources, and both animals will kill the other's young. Kelpies will make efforts to lure wood devils to the edges of their territories by imitating the calls of the devil to trick it into thinking its territory is under attack. By doing so on the very edge of two territories, it draws both the land owners together, and brings them into battle which may, if it is lucky, result in the death of one of them, reducing the kelpie's competition. The wood devil is much stronger and more dangerous than the kelpie, and the latter could never confront one directly. But the kelpie is smarter, and it is knows it. Wood devils, for all their physical prowess, have not yet evolved a way to counter this exploitation. Kelpie interference may be contributing to the increasingly small size of the wood devil, which like its precursor reaches sexual maturity before its adult size. Fewer wood devils may simply be able to reach their potential, as the biggest ones are the most pressing threat to the kelpie, and the most likely to be goaded into battle with its neighbors, potentially to fatal consequence. 

Gantuans can be many things. These dinosaurian skuorcs can be big like the cygnosaurs - bigger than anything else on land, except sometimes their next closest relatives the skulossi, - or quite small, as all of them begin their lives. Many are very formidable, and some may be among the most aggressive of any living creatures. But it may come as quite the surprise to discover that in the secluded glades of the far north, in the shadows of tall dark night forest trees, there is a gantuan that is gentle, curious and intelligent.

Slinking slendertails are a species of arc-necked gantuan, closely related to gatherganders and stranglepards, that is adapted to life year-round in the nightforest. This omnivorous animal, which somewhat resembles a juvenile cygnosaur, doesn't migrate even when the leaves drop and food grows harder to find. Faced with seasonal food shortages, it has remained relatively small, though at 6 feet tall and up to 380 lbs, it is not tiny, either. It is equally adept at traveling on the forest floor - where it strides on its knuckles to protect its long claws - or climbing up the trees, one of the biggest such animals that could be considered arboreal. An extremely long and prehensile tail can stretch to 10 feet long, over half the length of its body, and serves as an additional climbing limb. The spindly neck takes up another 3/5ths of its length, letting it reach food sources on tall, thin branches too weak to support its weight. Slinking slendertails are the high-browsers of the nightforest where not even larger ground-bound cygnosaurs can reach. But in winter easy green food disappears, and so the slendertail has to search out far more dispersed sources of nourishment.

The need to find these scattered resources in the vastness of the forest has led to the slinking slendertail becoming the most clever gantuan, and among the smartest of any skuorc, too. With the highest brain to body ratio of any gantuan species, its intellect is seemingly apparent in its face: its eyes - which face forward for depth perception - appear wide and bright and always sparkling with curiosity. This is an animal that may seem as interested in you as you are of it. It has to be curious, for investigation of new things is how it finds what little food there is to find through the lean winter season. As it clambers through the trees, it pries open bark to reveal insect larvae, selectively grazes on mushrooms, and picks small fruits and seeds from high branches. It strips buds from twigs, sitting on its haunches and using its forearms like hands to hold its food as it does so, and occasionally it hunts smaller animals it comes across in their tree hollow nests.

Generally solitary, it is not hostile to con-specifics. The slendertail has well-developed parental care, with mothers raising one or two young for as long as three years before they part, being one of the most k-strategized of any skuorc, and several adults may also come together and feed in close association rather spontaneously. These larger, temporary groups are most often mothers and grown, independent offspring which disperse at adulthood yet maintain contact with their parent, something that is rare in the animal kingdom, and otherwise unknown in gantuans. Males and females may also spend several weeks at a time in close association during mating season, which occurs in midwinter so as to time the birth of the young with the first light of spring. The young are able to climb and keep up with their mothers from birth, but are very naive and unwary of dangers and many behaviors instinctive in other skuorcs must be learned. They have to acquire many different methods to find food in the winter, and cannot survive without this long period of maternal care. Though this makes the young less self-sufficient than other gantuans, the need to learn new skills to survive rather than being born with an innate and unchanging skillset means that they have a much greater behavioral plasticity than other species, which lets them adjust quickly to changing conditions, novel food sources, or the appearance of unfamiliar dangers.

The skeavers, genus Scalprumaxillus, are a clade of of flying skurrels which are large and comparatively colorful; they cannot be confused with the several smaller and very conservative looking species of the genus Pellabornisaurus, which are usually very hard to discern from one another on looks alone. These animals can reach a weight of up to 9 pounds, almost ten times the size of other flying skurrels. They have brightly marked crests on their heads in contrasting black and white and red, and this is because they do not hibernate in the summer. Skeavers are active year-round, and thus their colored markings are used for species identification in the sunlit seasons, while disappearing in low-light conditions where the red appears black.

Skeavers have robust, sharply pointed beaks and very muscular jaws compared to other skurrels, adaptations to bore deep into dead tree branches and decomposing wood to find food that their relatives, limited to prying small pre-existing holes, cannot reach. The jaws of all skurrels open stronger than they close, letting them expand small bore holes made by insect larvae. But the skeaver's chisel-like bill further enables it to drill these small openings into expansive tunnels, its feeding characterized by the presence of small piles of wood chips left behind from its digging. But unlike a woodpecker, which the skeaver somewhat resembles, the skeaver's tongue is short and cannot reach very far into the holes it digs to fish out the food that hides inside them. For this, it uses a specialized - and especially long - finger on each forearm to reach into the holes and twist around until the sharp nail at the end of the digit skewers the prey within, dragging it out to be eaten. The scarlet skeaver, biggest species of its genus, is dependent on dead trees to supply enough insects to sustain itself and its offspring, which mated pairs - but not larger groups as in other skurrels - cooperatively rear in tree hollows. Yet this and other skeavers will also feed sometimes in living trees in order to access sweet sap, which is especially rich in calories in winter when the tree is dormant and storing sugars to fuel its summer growth. Then the skeavers will create and maintain several small taps in the tree, holes bored into the sapwood and regularly re-cut so as to maintain a steady flow of syrupy goodness. Other small animals - and occasionally larger ones, like trunkos - will also visit these taps to "steal" a taste of the sap from the skeavers, who in turn are stealing it from the trees.

Skeavers are so big that they are less agile when gliding than smaller species, but the trade-off is having fewer predators; they are mainly threatened by dire daggerbills and rarely the red rasp, being too large for smaller hunters to target, and too arboreal for the larger ruffed rasp to readily come across. They are also much more inclined to clamber on horizontal branches rather than cling to vertical trunks, which leaves them harder to spot amongst the foliage of the tree, and so they can navigate the forest by leaping only short distances most of the time as the trees of the night forest are rarely far apart and their crowns come close together. Their tails lack the three flattened, fan-shaped scales at their tips which other flying skurrels use to balance their glides, and instead a lion-like tail tuft performs the same role, if slightly less effectively. Their patagia, which provides lift when in the air, is relatively smaller than in smaller skurrels and so they glide for less distance, but can still utilize it in an escape maneuver when threatened in which the animal drops from its branch and plummets toward the ground, spreading its 'wings' and catching itself at the last minute. Most predators expect the skeaver to glide far away almost horizontally, like smaller skurrels do, and this rapid drop to a lower height confuses them, usually letting the skeaver escape unharmed, its attackers high above left puzzled as to where it has gone.

The lubovan is the second largest hawkyena in overall size after the bristly hawkyena, though the lighter red hawkyena can sometimes grow taller. It is a mid-sized predator of far northern Serinarcta, particularly the night forest, though it also ranges into the flood forest during dry periods. It is not a highly common predator, being thinly distributed and often displaced by larger predators, as it is not highly aggressive and is poorly adapted to live in areas without dense cover to hide in, preventing their migration to more isolated wooded regions. Though closest related to the spectacled fox crow, which though far smaller is placed in its same genus, lubovans represent parallel evolution to the bristly hawkyena as large, big-game hunting gravediggers which work in groups to bring down their quarry, and this cooperative hunting enables this animal, which weighs only around 70 pounds, they can collectively kill prey as large as four-hundred pounds, doing so by biting at the legs to drag it off its feet and then bite out the throat.

Female lubovans are socially dominant to males and live in a matrilineal social structure, like bristly hawkyenas, but differ in that adult males don't generally live in these groups. Males form bachelor clans which are not territorial, which visit different female clans which are territorial to mate and socialize for short increments, and their traveling maintains genetic diversity in the population. Male packs are not strongly bonded, prone to dominance clashes which can split them up, and also sometimes combining with other male groups when food is abundant enough to need more hunters to take it down. Female packs, however, are highly stable and last the lifetimes of many members. Within each female pack only a single adult reproduces at a time, spending several years in a reproductive role while sisters or older offspring assist in rearing her young by regurgitating them food, which does not occur in the bristly hawkyena. As she ages, she will be displaced by another of her relatives, but this is very rarely an aggressive event but rather one facilitated as a smooth and violence-free transition of power that appears to be democratically orchestrated by all of the clan's members, though exactly how they communicate this is unclear. There is a strong selective pressure to avoid any of the previous breeding females from being evicted from the pack, as after this role in their lives is over, they become elders that are important to teach younger lubovans life skills and impart knowledge of the terrain that only they, as the most experienced of the pack, may recall. The oldest female lubovan, even though she will no longer be reproductive, will hold the most dominant role in the pack structure and is viewed as a matriarch and valued for her experience that benefits all of her group. If more than one similarly aged female is present in a clan, they may share the role as a pair, especially those which are siblings. Lubovans are one of only a few animals where females live for a long time after they become infertile, as the assistance they continue to lend their descendants is still highly beneficial to the survival of their lineage.

Lubovans are apex predators insofar as the adults not usually being hunted, though they often defer to larger predators, and the very young are sometimes threatened by ruffed rasps and by kelpies. The bulk of their diet is trunkos and unicorns such as the equinox. They are ambush predators, not long-distance chasers, relying on thick cover and darkness to sneak close and surround their targets and then converge around them, cutting off all routes of escape. Their eyesight is acutely adapted for navigating in near total darkness, but they are color blind as a result, and thus show none of the reddish feather colors of other species. Their black and grey plumage blends better into the dappled light of the forest when hunting, but a white head crest and a similarly bright flag of erectile plumage running along their backs can be raised as a visual signal to communicate with others of their kind, the exact posture dictating emotional states and intent. Quiet when hunting so as to go undetected, lubovans will follow quickly flashed movements of their packmate's plumage to coordinate their hunts - though they can vocalize with a loud fox-like bark, they do almost exclusively only during play or aggressive combat, with their communication otherwise being largely non-verbal. Though largely carnivorous and eating the meat of big game, the lubovan also feeds on fruit when available, and in winter as much as 15% of its diet can be comprised of insects, mainly beetles, which emerge to breed in the winter season. At this time of year, even smaller bugs can be common enough to satiate the lubovans, which will forage with their snouts low to the ground around logs and forest debris to locate swarms of emerging insects.

Though winter in the night forest means that its largest species move on and the biggest herds dwindle away until the leaves return, the long dark season is anything but silent. The smaller creatures which remain now have their season. They feed and breed in the absence of so many summertime enemies and competitors. The winter forest echoes with the buzz of insects, the barks and chatter of tribbets, and the plaintive trills of nocturnal birds, a different cast from the sweet summer songs, but no more silent. There are songs of love filling the air, cries of anger, and sweet-sounding garbled voices from sinister tongues that are not what they imply. And there is one who hears them all, understanding the language of each, but speaking none of them itself.

The secretkeeper is the only jungle-dwelling signalope. Living so far north that visual communication is unusable for half the year, it has lost the focus its relatives have on flashing signs through their ear pigments and honed in entirely on its sense of hearing. It's a small animal, only the size of a mid-sized dog. But it is very intelligent, in a distinct sort of compartmentalized way. Problem solving is not so much its strongsuit, but memory of many intricate details it excels at. A social animal which travels the night forest in family groups, they memorize pathways through the shadows and always having an escape route or two or three close at hand. Their summer diet is varied and based on green leaves, but in winter they fatten on fallen nuts and gnaw on big, plump mushrooms which spring up from the damp ground and the trunks of old trees. As they don't graze grass and rely less on sight than other tribbymaras, their eyes are set slightly lower on their heads. Their ears, expectedly, are the biggest of their family. Like satellite dishes they swivel around, picking up each and every noise. And like a computer always filing data, the secretkeeper memorizes every noise in the soundtrack of their lives. 

Every call, chirp, and bark has meaning, known at first only to its maker. But through experience and context, the secretkeeper learns the languages of all the forest species it comes across. In doing so, it gains access to a great store of detail, each species revealing unknowingly a library of their own information. Alarm calls made by one with a high vantage to warn its young of danger reveal a secret message that the secretkeeper will follow, vanishing into cover before an approaching predator ever knows it was near. Soft, gentle calls by another tell of the self-assured joy of food successfully cached away - and the secretkeeper, hearing all but telling none, may later visit the spot and find a meal for itself at their expense. To catalog the words and observe the corresponding behavior of every animal in the forest would take any one individual a lifetime, but secretkeepers teach others; young observe the behaviors of adults in response to new noises, and so learn the meanings too. Adults go so far as to teach their young, with many of their own different vocalizations they produce bearing distinct, innate meanings describing whether a soung signals something good or bad, whether food is involved, whether there is a predator and what kind it may be, and where it may be coming from (left, right, up, behind, or ahead.)

 Not even enemies with sophisticated talent for deception will fool the secretkeeper, the only animal to outsmart the fearsome kelpie at its own game; it rarely falls for its imitations, for the secretkeeper's own language is indecipherable. When communicating within their own groups, with morse-code-like clicking voices, they reference themselves with consistent syllable patterns - 'names' unique to each individual - and also address those to whom they speak and about what. They speak in secrets because they know themselves, knowing that others may be listening, and they do not want to be eavesdropped upon. Kelpies emulating their noises do so blind to the intricacies of their speech and speak nonsense - their ruse is obvious. Only the youngest, most naive babies would follow their voices, but sheltered within the family group and always kept close, they are never given the chance. Danger, chirp the adults when one is heard. And the young, who might have grown curious, cowers in response. They ensure that it will never fall for the kelpie's deception. Some like the kelpie may steal the voices of others, but the secretkeeper only borrows them.

There is a shift that comes with the seasons this far north, and it is palpable even when summer is still in swing. The days are getting shorter, and even though the high point of the year may not yet be over, the end is now in sight. Autumn's slow creep comes with cool breezes, Serina itself breathing a plaintive sigh. All things come and all things go. When the first leaves drop, it's the sign for most of the forest's visitors to begin their journeys south to sunnier lands. An exodus begins before each polar winter, and by the time the sun sets for the last time in this calendar year, most of the herds and flock and packs and gaggles are long gone, leaving only the hardy year-round residents which are often small, or solitary. But this is only the beginning of the journey for one.

The autumnal airwalker is a ptoose related to the celestial skychaser, one which only arrives in the night forest in the fall when most have left. Its migrations are much shorter than its relatives, and it summers only a few days flight away in the southern upperglades. It is a nocturnal ptoose, itself an uncommon thing. With big, bright eyes, it is active by night and avoids the bright light of day. Yet unlike so many animals of the night, this bird isn't brown or grey or black, but a shining, brilliant white. It stands out, rather than hides, and on clear nights when the sky is lit bright with flashing auroras, the airwalker's wing and crest feathers reflect their own light show of iridescent blue patterns. They come to the night forest in its winter to court and to breed when few animals do so. And what draws them here, besides the comfortable darkness, are bugs. Countless, swarming, big, beautiful bugs. 

This is a ptoose that looks like a crane, but does not live like one. Though its neck is long and graceful and it stands tall and proud, the airwalker hardly ever touches the ground. It is an arboreal bird, and under its feathers it weighs much less than it may seem to based on its height - only around 45 pounds, so that it can balance on surprisingly small branches with ease. Adapted to survive the flood forest during summers, it learned to perch up in trees by necessity, and then to capitalize on the misfortune of smaller creatures which were also forced into the treetops by seasonal floodwaters. It spends its summers in small flocks, flying between the canopies of underwater trees, gleaning a diet of insects and small vertebrates which take shelter above the water line. Its beak is long and sharp, though not hooked; it is perfectly designed to grab small animals like a set of tweezers, and all food is swallowed whole. It is one of the most carnivorous pteese, eating around 80% animal matter, but also supplementing with fruits, nuts, and fungi when they are available. The flood forest is a place rich in food, but only during the floods, and floods are unpredictable and occur at different times in distant regions of the upperglades. This makes nesting difficult; where food may be now, it could be gone tomorrow. And where a nest was placed today, could be underwater next week. To ensure the safety of their young, the airwalker needs a more stable place to breed, where food can be predictably located in abundance at the same time each year, and where the trees are tall enough to keep their nests high and dry no matter the weather. The night forest is perfect on every account.

Flocks descend here just before the last sunset and remain until first light of spring. They build large platform-like nests of sticks in the tallest trees, lining them with moss and brooding their pupa within, and so many pairs collectively keep alert for predators, such frightful things of the night as the red rasp and the daggerbill, working together to swarm and drive even these large and formidable enemies away. For four months or so they work around the clock, males and females alternately brooding their young - uncommon for seraphs, in which females more often do the full incubation - and then, even more unusually, feeding the chicks which do not permanently leave the nest until over 5 weeks old. Their normal fledging is delayed, for it is safer for them to remain in the protection of the colony rather than fly away immediately on their own, though if a nest is threatened by a predator, even chicks just days old will flee and leap away, parachuting with their wing feathers which are only partially erupted and then, with luck, dropping and clinging to some lower branch. Due to the long period of parental dependence, airwalkers have a greater capacity to recognize their own young than most pteese. Both parent and offspring learn to decipher the tone of their own family from the din of other nesting adults in the vicinity, so that if a chick does become lost away from its nest, it can call out and a parent will come to its aid, letting the chick grab onto its neck and returning it to the nest site. By the time spring returns to the night forest, the young are fully flighted and strong enough to keep pace with the adult flock. Young remain in the company of their parents until the next autumn, following them back to the night forest and from then on having learned the route, and able to repeat the trip each year for the rest of their lives.

The strikeworms are dramatically dimorphic verminfan birds, the females of which have become large, ambush predators with forearms modified into a set of powerful snapping jaws. Males of the clade, in extreme contrast, are small, narrow-billed birds - usually pollinators - with clumsy flight on account of their wings also retaining the modified shape of the female's. Most strikeworm females are long lived, while males appear briefly and live only to disperse their genes and mate with the sedentary females. Very rarely indeed does a male live to mate more than once. Even more rarely does a female form a partnership with her mate, for what good could he serve her? The two could not be more different. But as with every rule in nature, there is an exception.

Tree strikeworms, not closely related to cliff strikeworms or others of that genus, are a species of arboreal strikeworm adapted strongly to live in old, dead snags in northern Serinarcta's polar forests. The female can reach an incredible size of 40 lbs and an extended length of four feet, though in her natural habitat she is very rarely fully visible, as 2/3 of her length is muscular tail, normally coiled tightly within a tree hollow; spines on her sides hook into the wood and prevent her from being pulled out by larger predators. The female's tail is tipped with a keratin hook, a single massive claw, with which she excavates her hole larger as she grows throughout her life, so that a small crevice that sheltered her as a tiny larvae can eventually be expanded to fill her hefty aadult mass. She will not move more than a few feet from her shelter for as long as she lives, unless it is somehow destroyed, in which case she will laboriously migrate to seek another shelter, a time during which she is extremely vulnerable.

To spend one's whole life in one place allows a great deal of energy conservation, but is a gamble. All food that the female eats must come close enough to her hiding spot to be caught, which is done with her massive, spiked forearms. With them, she can hold and restrain an animal larger than herself, hoisting it up to her true beak and eating it alive. But many weeks, or even months, can sometimes pass with no animals coming onto her branch that are big enough to sustain her. So the female tree strikeworm, unique among its lineage, has partnered up with the male. The male is large - for a male strikeworm - and can attain a wingspan of up to a foot across. His use to her, beyond occasional fertilization of her eggs, is in his mobility. She tolerates him near her and does not hunt him, even as he takes meat from her jaws and feeds himself on her spoils. But then he does something strange. He strips pieces from the carcass, removing skin and hide and sinew, and he drapes it over himself, disguising his appearance as much as his scent. He now resembles some other sort of creature, possibly dead, and yet still moving. He remains close by the female, fluttering around, seemingly wasting time and energy. A poor flier, his movements suggest an injured animal. A predatory bird comes in to investigate - and in an instant, the female snatches it in her jaws, strangling it. The male has become a lure, baiting animals into the female's jaws by disguising itself as prey. 

Even as the cloak dries up and the vestiges of flesh and blood disintegrate, the dried skin and fur or feathers remain, hiding the male, letting his cosplay as some other creature go on, and so avoiding predators learning to avoid the male on sight. They make a good team together, and both benefit from the arrangement; the female gets a more reliable food supply, while the male ensures all of the female's offspring will be his own - his reproductive success far exceeds the strikeworm average. Eventually, each male nevertheless expires; sometimes his deception leads to his death, if the predator is faster than his mate. The female doesn't mourn - she lacks the capacity. But when another male comes knocking, she will form a new partnership of convenience. Though each male can live several years, she will still go through a dozen or more in her own lifetime; from her perspective, the change of mates ensures diversity in her descendants, and so she does nothing to actually defend any of her partners. It is up to him to avoid his own predators. If he is too slow, then maybe he wasn't the ideal mate anyway.