The Oddball Giraffowl

Most giraffowl, a clade of flightless archangel metamorph birds, are tall, majestic, tree-browsing creatures, but there is a black sheep or two or three (or six..) in every family. They may differ from the norm by being very small, living in unusual places, having a highly distinctive appearance, or demonstrating unique behavior that makes them stand out against the crowd.

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The swoose are a few species of semi-aquatic giraffowl which are closely allied to their terrestrial kin and which evolved from within the genus Coronacristax. Now highly distinct at 290 million years PE, they are elevated to a new genus of their own.

These swimming seraphs are not as large as their relatives, standing about thirteen feet high. Their crests are a little smaller relative to their size, with that of the resplendent swoose being somewhat flattened and lobed, like the antlers of a moose. As in all skybreakers, males are extremely colorful while females are plain. Swoose live in similar female-dominated social hierarchies, with males living peripheral and within their own social structure, and like their relatives these seraphs eat mostly plants. The main difference is that swoose browse downward, not up on tree branches but on submerged aquatic grasses and other coastal vegetation. Their legs are shorter and sturdier, to stand up to waves while wading in shallow water, and equipped with webbed digits to actively swim on the surface, something taller seraphs cannot accomplish, for their center of balance is too high. Like huge swans, the swoose - made buoyant by a fatty back hump - bob along in the ocean, reaching their necks below water to feed.

It is hard, at first, to understand what drove the rapid evolution of a browsing land animal to the sea at a time and place when forests are abundant and their normal food supply not in scarcity. The answer is that the swoose evolved in a place where forests were not in abundance; not on their homeland on Serinaustra, but the northern continent Serinarcta, a land dominated by grasslands and where woodlands were, until very recently, sparse due to intense thorngrazer grazing. With fully flighted and highly mobile chicks, waterfowl-like skybreaker young often dispersed across oceans and colonized the northern continent, but died out as they grew to adulthood for lack of suitable food sources. Swoose descend from a population of such wayward southerners that managed to survive by remaining along water sources, becoming shorter and smaller so that they can continue to feed on water plants through adulthood. They are found along both northern and southern coasts today, wherever sea-grasses grow in abundance. The pouch of the female is watertight; reproduction is otherwise like terrestrial species.

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A giraffowl does not have to do something so extreme as move into the ocean to be unusual, however. The canecrane is a solitary giraffowl endemic to polepoa forests, which feeds on them to near exclusion, targeting the young canes before they harden. Polepoa, a tall clonal grass with distinctively sugar-rich tissues, grows in large numbers throughout the Serinaustran ecoregion in the late hothouse, providing a food source for many animals and shelter for even more. With a wood-like outer shell polepoa grows to heights of over 100 feet. This support protects the soft, watery interior in which the plant stores sugars in its sap. And this is the food the canecrane, a specialized herbivore, seeks above all others. 

The canecrane has a sharp spur on each foreleg, used to puncture the skin of the stalk, and then pulls it apart and browses on the juicy, sweet material inside. It shares its habitat and its diet with the greater firefox, though this animal is better adapted to eat older and more difficult to open canes than the less powerful canecrane, and has a more southerly distribution. Canecranes live alone and are fairly sedentary, spending their adult lives each within small tracts of polepoa forest. They cannot chew open mature, dry canes as can the firefox, and so are restricted to the coastal glades where plants grow the year round and there is no prolonged polar darkness. Juveniles, flighted like most giraffowl, share this habitat preference but have sharper probing bills, and favor insects living within the plants than the plants themselves. Canecranes are a primitive giraffowl, as demonstrated by the scales still present on their wrists and ankles and a small, naked wing finger that does not entirely fall off with age. 

Canecranes move slowly and purposely and are adapted to blend into their habitat remarkably well, matching the nodes of the grass with similarly colored brown horizontal stripes and even copying patches of damaged tissue with brown and gold splotches on their green feathered coats. They are not fast runners and freeze in plain sight when initially threatened, blending into the background and even swaying in the breeze in time with their surroundings. They are tall, as high as twelve feet, but extremely narrow for their dimensions, with a maximum width of just eighteen inches on their torsos. Because their diet is rich in sugar it is easily digested, meaning they do not need a large stomach like most herbivores, allowing them a very narrow body shape that lets them slip between gaps in the canes with ease and avoid larger predators. Males sport long, paper-thin pointed crests only 2 centimeters thick but up to 25 inches high which are virtually invisible from ahead or behind but stand out if viewed from the side; though usually green as the rest of the body, during courting blood vessels below the thin horn-like sheath flush it into a deep shade of violet. Though normally almost mute, males attract females with short, repetitive croaking calls in the spring, though most communication is not visual or auditory at all but - unusually for birds - based on scent markings which are rubbed on the polepoa canes from a gland near their tear ducts. 

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What is the furthest thing an animal can do from making its home in the sea? Perhaps it would be making it on a high mountain slope. This is the habitat of the third of our oddballs. Sizeable sky Islands are relatively rare in Serinaustra, but they are present, particularly near the sea coast in the west of the continent and in some places along the coast of the great blue saltlake. Their fauna differs significantly from those in northern regions, but the same environmental conditions found upon each result in varying degrees of convergent evolution in the inhabitants of each region's incarnations.

Without unicorns to climb the sheer cliff edges of the islands, in Serinaustra their place is most often taken by small, primitive giraffowl. Species like the scruck, a close relative of the canecrane, have evolved to cling to the ledges with hooked claws that never fully re-shape from the talons of the flying juvenile into the blunt hooves of most species at adulthood, and which give them a better grip on the crags where they use their very long necks to reach isolated tufts of grass and other weeds. The bill crest of the scruck is short, often crooked and vaguely back-swept into a hook; males lock horns and joust for female affections, but only rarely does one manage to yank the other off the ledge to its death in this way. Scrucks clamber along nearly cliffs by hanging with their claws, in contrast to the fleet-footed thorngrazers that find tiny footholds on which to stand upright, but both animals feed on scattered mountain vegetation and avoid predators by moving over terrain few animals can cling to. 

A social species, the scruck always travels in small bands, in which at least member is always keeping a look out above its fellows for danger as they scrounge for vegetable scraps that take root in any small crevice that can hold a patch of soil. Their first reaction to danger is to freeze and hide in plain sight, only fleeing with an ungainly scramble if a predator continues closer. Lightweight and lanky, the scruck can move much quicker over the mountains that it might seem and rarely misses a step; it tries to avoid enemies by getting to a vertical wall with nothing to stand on and hanging there until the danger passes, or even climbing up below an overhang and dangling there where they hope that no predator can follow. Sometimes, even most of the time, they succeed. But of course, as a common herbivore of its environment, some scrucks are always and inevitably caught by the sky islands' predators, which have of course adapted as much to the steep terrain as their prey.

The juvenile scruck is similar to that of other members of its genus in being a weak flier and feeding on leafy vegetation even in infancy, though supplemented with insects. Flight feathers are lost early in life, often before 4 months of age. Juveniles are most commonly found flocking in the branches at the peak of the island, a denizen of its crowning forest, and move down the ledges as they grow larger than the trees can typically support. Juveniles are commonly preyed upon by such enemies as the creeping craguar and the formidable clobbering kak, two very different sorts of carnivores which take the role of animals like repanthors in this southern version of a more typically northern biome.

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Sometimes giraffowl end up strangely adapted because they have found themselves in a place with little competition - islands. They are a clade that is adapted to long-distance migrations in their first year of life - ending up in new habitats, and sometimes establishing new populations there. Because of the tendency of their chicks to fly far away from their birthplaces, often overseas and in random directions, they easily reach isolated landmasses. The result of these new colonization to insular places can go either of two ways. The first is the maintenance of a single widespread species, living over much of the world, which interbreed as different populations reach each other with the migrations of the young ones off their birthplace islands. This was the case for the earliest giraffowl, the fallen angel, for over a million years.

 Yet eventually this system is likely to lead to speciation, where over a long time the different island forms become a little more distinct from one another, and increasingly isolated as their chicks become less inclined - and eventually incapable - of leaving their island, perhaps due to a lack of local predators making leaving too dangerous for populations which have lost even a little wariness of enemies in the outside world. Once any degree of naivety becomes ingrained in an island species, and they are more likely to be hunted or otherwise die if they leave home, their dispersal to other places becomes actively harmful to the population - a pressure which is then selected against. Once this cycle is set into motion, island giraffowl are prone to rapidly evolve traits that limit or reduce migration of the juveniles altogether, usually in the form of underdeveloped wings that make them weak fliers - or in some cases, flightless from infancy. Anything that keeps them on the island, where they are safer, lets more survive and spreads such traits until they are fixed into the entire species. While hybridization with closely related forms that still migrate to the islands can dilute this effect, by the time it is noticeable insular giraffowl have likely already evolved unique social behaviors that make successful hybridization less likely. 

The crownprinces are a genus of flightless, dwarfed giraffowls native to the island landmass of Zarreland, which notably lacks most land predators. Here, predation pressure is mostly absent, and so sexual selection has gone wild with little to constrain it. Relatives of the far larger skybreakers, they host remarkably exaggerated male crests far bigger than would be expected for their body size, different in each of the three native species, are strong signals by which females recognize mates of their own kinds and deter mating with flying vagrants from other islands. These creatures live in the island's dense jungles, and the horns of each are extraordinary and even absurd. They have evolved crest shapes that can become so large and ungainly they can make their owners slow and awkward, since they have little need to run from danger, even though the huge structures are lighter than they look due to numerous small air pockets within. They grow differently in each type, making it very clear which species is which. One grows wide, one grows long radiating spikes, and the third, the firecrest, grows out at first with several antler-like tines, but then continues up... and up... and up. Eventually it arcs backwards, after almost doubling the height of the animal it is attached to. It is a clear signal to the females that this is the male they want, and so distinct that any other crest shape will be obviously wrong, so that these animals very rarely mate between species even though they still can.

Small forest-dwellers, the deer-like crownprinces are tiny compared to their mainland relatives because there is less space, and animals with less mass can maintain larger populations with less to eat. Yet relative to their size, they have the biggest chicks of all the giraffowl. With fewer enemies, they also have the smallest broods, always of just two or three, but each pupating chick is born relatively massive, about 6 lbs - 10% of an average female's body weight, and heavier than the winged newborns of the largest giraffowls! They visibly distend the pouch of their mother as they incubate, and when they leave it they have no wings to speak of, only a small and vestigial flight finger without feathers, which dries up and falls off within days of birth. They don't disperse, staying in the area in which they are born, and they do not differ nearly as much in niche from their parents as other giraffowl. Not only can they not fly, but they are not adapted to swim, and rather than spend their first months near water, they roam the forest undergrowth in small herds, camouflaged by streaky dappled coats of feathers. The adult and juvenile niche has effectively become consolidated, with juveniles differing in diet from the adults only in eating more insects but being otherwise similar as selective, omnivorous foragers of invertebrates, fruit, and new green shoots. Both young and adults indeed share habitat preference and may even feed together in mixed-age groups, which may provide additional protection from small predators even though parents neither recognize nor protect their young.

Most giraffowl have magnificent crests with which to attract mates, even though few can match the crownprinces in their size. Some species, though, have none at all. These decorations reach their peak in animals with relatively few predators, be it due to great size or isolated habitat. Especially for forest-dwelling mainland species which are small enough to be threatened by hunters, a large crest can be a liability. Yet it is important for the female to be impressed by some sort of display structure, and without one, a male stands no chance of mating. So what is a little jungle giraffowl to do? Those of the genus Vesicaramus though live in dense forest and so lack large beak horns, compensating with flamboyant inflatable airsacs that mimic their shape and spread. 

Bladderbucks have come to a solution in the form of an inflatable crest, which can be retracted when not in use to avoid getting caught up in forest trees. A deer-like species only as big as an elk, the bladderbuck lives a solitary life in deep, shadowed forests where it hides from threats and flees danger by dashing through thick vegetation. A hard crown couldn't work here, and so this species has only the smallest hump on its upper bill. It has instead evolved a balloon-like structure around its nostrils, which connects to air sacs in the throat to swell with air like an inflated glove. 

The sacs of the male bladderbuck, one on either side of the face, have six sweeping tines, like the antler of a deer, and give the illusion of a crest of great size and incredible color to the female. Males form leks during the mating season to attract discerning females, calling with low booming and popping noses as they rapidly spread and deflate their horns; the numbers of the lek help discourage predators which would take on a single male, while making it easy for females to find them.

There is, however, one especially pitiful little giraffowl that has not only no crest of which to speak, but scarcely any bladders, either. Only two little flaps of skin inflate on either side of its mouth, alone making a rather unimpressive display. But the bowerbuck, a close relative of the bladderbuck, has evolved a new method of getting noticed, and so compromises for his physical shortcomings. He makes a new crest all on his own, and in doing so can draw the eyes of choosy females up higher than it ever could with only its own body as the display structure. During the mating season, when the longdark swamp's shadowed veil lifts and the sunlight returns through the trees, he begins feverishly clearing a spot in the forest to build a remarkable tower. 

The male bowerbuck constructs an artificial extension of his own crest in the form of a tall interwoven spire of sticks that can reach past 7 feet tall, which he then adorns with forest flowers, berries, feathers and other colorful objects. Each male maintains a clearing in the jungle, dutifully removing even a single out of place leaf from his arena, from which he calls out with a warbling song to let the females know he is ready. When one shows up - smaller than him, cryptically colored, and shier too - he begins to display. He positions himself behind his construction and inflates his small airsacs, rapidly shaking his neck left to right to reveal one, then the other behind the tower, and moving from near ground level until he has to stand on his hind legs to reach his neck to the peak. After displaying the male will try to get around the tower to see the female, but she will keep it between them so that the pair begin to spin around and around as she circles and he follows. Together they spiral, faster and faster, until he catches up to her and they mate. If she is not interested in his tower, however - perhaps the floral decorations have wilted, or the tower is simply not symmetrical, she will not play the game. He will approach her and she will defy him with a snap of her beak before turning and slipping away again into the forest, leaving him - literally - deflated. Because the male takes no part at all in child-care (though neither does she, after releasing her pupating pouch-young), the female must be very choosy in which male she mates with. One who cannot maintain the freshest decorations and the strongest, tallest tower are simply not as fit as those who can, as to take time to do so means the male is able to get so much to eat, and so easily avoid predators, that he can devote hours each day to an unnecessary activity that directly puts him in harms way. Building the bower successfully is an honest signal of fitness, and a similar handicap to a huge horn crest, only in a different way. 

The mating season lasts only a couple of weeks. When spring arrives in earnest and the sun fills the air, the bright early blooms he uses to garnish his artwork fade, and the females have come out of season. So he abandons his arena, and the tower falls to disrepair until the next season when - if he remains in good shape - he will return to fix it up, and do it all over again.