Stormveld

290 Million Years Post-Establishment

The tall grass rainplains of the stormveld provide cover in which to hide, both for prey and their predators. This is a biome which wraps around the southern edge of the world, ringing over half of Serinaustra's coastline. It is a region that remains wild and uncharted, not yet dominated by the pack-hunting squabgoblins, and still populated by myriad stranger, little-seen hunters. The stormveld characteristically lacks most large megafauna as occur elsewhere in the world: an absence of substantial trees prevents the evolution of browsers, and lightning strikes pose a very real risk to very large species that cannot seek cover during inclement weather, so what few species do reach weights over 1,000 lbs are low to the ground. Two wide-ranging apex predators rule the plain together in an unusual alliance, tolerating one another and cooperatively keeping away other large competitors. Beneath their noses, however, a very wide array of smaller and far more secretive creatures of all kinds make this sea of grass their home. 

The hulking hoglump is one of the stormveld's largest herbivores, weighing up to 1,100 lbs. It is a trunko descended from the much daintier hoglump of some fifteen million years earlier, while one of its closest contemporary relatives is the lumperjack; these two diverged just seven million years ago. Among the largest hoglumps, very few animals pose a threat to an adult hoglump now, which is armed from snout to rump with formidable ossified spikes and further protected by osteoderms throughout its skin, just below the surface, that are strong enough to break a would-be predator's teeth. But even a giant, ornery trunko such as this begins life far smaller and much, much more fragile. A baby hoglump, just hatched from an egg within its mother's natal pouch, is a helpless 25 lbs ball of fluffy feathers. It is wholly dependent on their protection, and yet there is a long gap in time between the size it is small enough to be carried in the pouch, and when it is big enough to fend for itself. It takes a hulking hoglump five years to reach full adulthood and maximum size, and in particular for the first two years is at a high risk of predation, be it from the sky-surveying skystalker, the ground-running dicax or any of the veld's other smaller, sneakier hunters that lie in wait in the tall grass to strike. Though the grass of this wind-swept and stormy plain provides cover, it also hides danger. So the hulking hoglump has devised another way to protect its offspring. It has become one of the world's largest burrowers.

These trunkos are living earth-movers, much as the lumperjack is living chainsaw. In their case, their horned facial flanges are used not to cut trees, but for working like a pair of great shovels to cut through packed soil and excavate what can become extraordinary passages down into the earth. With a face that resembles the clawed paws of a mole only hundreds of time larger, the hoglump claws out a sizable tunnel up to seven feet high and around 5 feet wide, just big enough for it to fit going forwards or backwards. Deep in the burrow, perhaps 50 feet or even further down, the passage widens into one or more chambers that can be as large as 30 feet across, allowing the tunneling titan to turn around. It is in these larger spaces, in the dark and the quiet, that hulking hoglumps hide their chicks. The young are safe in their dens from aerial attack, and only a single entryway is easily guarded by one adult while the other can leave the den to graze and feed itself. But while some hoglump mothers may raise their single chick alone in a comparatively shallow den, most live in larger groups of six to ten females, which cooperatively maintain their burrow complex and alternate duties to defend the narrow entrance from predators seeking access. Male hulking hoglumps are solitary, and thus do not assist their mates in any way with childcare, and indeed can pose a threat to them if they find them, seeking to kill them and so make their mother receptive to breed again. So the burrow becomes a shelter for the little lumps not just from other species, but their own kind as well.

A single female can just as easily defend five or more chicks hidden within it as it could defend one, for its body fully fills the entryway and no hunter dares get past the wall it puts up with its gnashing flanges and the large horns over its snout and eyes, allowing the rest of the herd to spend much of the day feeding. Typically, though any mother will take the post of guard duty, only a chick's own parent will actively provide food for it. Throughout the day different adults will return at a time, be permitted to enter the chamber, and respond only to the unique chirp of their own young. Others will have to wait for their meal - a highly nutritious, fatty secretion that the adult produces in its stomach, far more nourishing than grass alone - until their own mom comes home. Though in some ways a highly pro-social and cooperative species, hulking hoglumps' general focus only on their own chicks can mean that they may grow at uneven rates, giving some notable physical advantages over others, and resulting in a dark side that sometimes shows itself within larger hoglump herds. Each hoglump parent will usually only defend its own chick from the attacks of others, and within a burrow, a hierarchy often develops between different chicks as some are left hungry and others are well-fed. The most well-fed young are often the biggest, yet they are not usually the aggressors as may be expected. It is, in fact, the less cared for young that sometimes become highly aggressive and attack their more privileged siblings, even those bigger than themselves. As long as their target's own mother is not present the current guard of the burrow rarely intervenes, and if a chick that is not her own dies, she will likely consume the carcass to hide the scent from predators. If another hoglump mother enters the burrow and finds her own chick has disappeared in this way, her instincts to nurture any chick will likely lead her to feed whichever is most hungry in the den. Most likely this will be her own child's killer, which she will often adopt in replacement of her own murdered offspring. This can either allow an orphan whose real mother has stopped returning to the den to survive, or in rare cases such a killer will now be tended by two parents and quickly become the most dominant and largest chick in the group. Conflict between chicks increases markedly the more there are confined to the den together - a place where they will be forced to stay in or right near for two full years - and so there is a balance of group numbers that typically is maintained. Fewer than five adults, and predation risk increases, with the den more likely to be left unattended at least part of the day. More than ten adults, and multiple females may argue over who is supposed to watch the den at any one time, not letting others past when they should, meaning some mothers are delayed in getting inside to feed their young. The resulting hungrier, more crowded chicks will often fight enough to whittle down their numbers, with up to half being killed by the others.

The social lifestyle and grandiose burrows created by the hulking hoglump may provide both benefits and risks to their own species, depending on the circumstance, and this is true for other species as well. These tunnels seem like they could be a safe haven for many other smaller species to hide and rear their own young, but only if they can be certain to dodge and avoid the thundering footsteps of the giants that built them; because the dens are constantly being expanded and offer little room to maneuver, cohabitation is often quite dangerous for most other species which are likely to be stepped on or have their own nests destroyed during repairs. The large mounds of soil deposited outside a hoglump burrow are a much safer option to other species that need a safe den of their own but may lack the strength to create one in the ground unaided, and this is the way many animals manage to benefit from the lump's presence. Foxtrotters, burdles, and smaller trunkos may all take advantage of the piles of loose dirt nearby lump dens to dig their own places to hide and raise young. Thus despite its potential to be destructive, and the aggression often observed within its own kind, the hulking hoglump does create habitat for other life in the stormveld, being one of its keystone species. Even animals that do not dwell in burrows at all can be drawn near to them to find food. Because the dens are used for a long time and always occupied, they tend to become a haven for parasites. Birds as the split river snapjaw often finding them a reliable place to perch and catch biting flies and smaller osteopulma birds that are drawn to the trunkos and which feed on their blood or tissue, providing some relief to the herd.

The evening mump is a much smaller sealump trunko that stands to 3.5 feet, weighing up to 120 lbs. Its genus is related closest to the bloblump lineage, though they diverged at the start of the hothouse some 18 million years ago. It is very common in the stormveld, where like most of the native herbivores it travels in secluded pathways hidden under a canopy of tall grass stalks, hiding it from its primary predators that both stalk the skies and the ground. It most typically forages in pairs or even alone, but often dens in small related groups, constructing communal shelters in the grass by weaving stalks together into a lattice that provides cover from rain. In these nests, which may be six feet high and ten across, up to ten mumps will squeeze in together to sleep, and collectively build a soft, insulating bed of plant material. An herbivore, food is plentiful here, and the same grasses that provide it cover make up virtually its entire diet, too, though it will partake in fungi, fruits, and nuts at the edges of wooded areas and occasionally ventures into forests at the edge of its range. They are fond of water and especially of mud, and will wallow in it, perhaps to make themselves less attractive to biting insects and birds, and perhaps for protection from the sun. This is important, for these trunkos are almost totally featherless, perhaps an adaptation to reduce external parasite loads (like mites) in a wet environment where it is never cold enough to chill them. The name of their genus, Glaberetrus, translates to "smooth-back" and it is for this trait shared with most of the trunkos called "mumps." Dark in color and sleek from head to toe, they slide easily through the grass stalks, running quickly down well-worn paths, quick to vanish from sight. Though very abundant, the wary evening mump is not often spotted.

Evening mumps are crepuscular, leaning toward nocturnal, and so their name reflects their activity pattern wherein they typically appear just before the sun sets and feed into the night. They return to their nests after midnight, to doze and digest, and have a second but more brief active period in the hour leading up to sunrise. Large, soft eyes give the mump keen night vision at the expense of color sensitivity; it sees only blue and yellow, a rarity among most extant birds. Most of their communication among their own kind is via sound, while their food is found mostly through scent. Touch is important in every aspect of the animal's life from food gathering to social bonding, and their trunks are capable of both very fine dexterity (such as picking a single berry) and significant force in uprooting plants by the roots to feed. The tip of the trunk has three distinct fleshy pads that can be separated or come together like stubby fingers, giving it among the most delicate grip of any trunko.

The evening mump is fast and nimble, relying first on being unseen, then on outrunning, and outmaneuvering its predators. But it has many enemies, and is an important food source for several species from the clutchclaws (that mainly target the young) to the dicax and the skystalker. So the mump must grow quickly and reproduce often to sustain its numbers. With no limit on their food, young mumps reach adult size in just 12 months, and females have two babies per year, which are dependent on her for about half that time, and can fend for themselves once the next calf hatches and leaves the mother's pouch. Mump numbers can rise and fall significantly over time cyclically and opposite to the populations of their predators, though this occurs at a more gradual time scale than in many other similar ecological relationships. At their peaks, as many as 1.5 million evening mumps might be found on the stormveld, but occasional population crashes also occur in which their numbers can drop to only ~200,000, often every 30 to 40 years. The exact causes of these falls remain unclear; predation is not the primary factor, but disease may spread more easily between individuals when they come across each other more at high density. The evening mump seems adapted, as a species, to quickly recover from these setbacks. When there are very low populations, females may have up to three young per year, raising two of differing age at the same time. Males are capable of assisting in childcare, but seem to do so less effectively the more mumps there at at any point in time, perhaps because higher population densities cause more conflict between groups, where males focus on defending their families and come into territorial dispute. When mumps are rarer, in contrast, females may lay two eggs instead of one in a clutch, and the male will brood an additional egg, effectively doubling their reproductive output. Male evening mumps may have evolved to be only facultative parents, which actively help rear young only in times of low population density, as a measure to quickly help the population recover after a calamity, while at other times it is more important they defend their mates from more abundant rivals. Whether this is a derived or an ancestral characteristic is unknown, for it is the only member of its genus in which males still sometimes brood their eggs.

Great golden squaboons are stunning and almost regal animals, particularly the males, which are up to three times as large as their mates and dressed head to tail in bright golden plumage. Small fleshy brow "horns" in their ancestor, the superb squaboon, have lengthened as well, becoming flexible back-swept crests which accentuate their brightly colored faces and when raised make them appear even taller than they already are, which at up to 6 feet, is already significantly bigger than their ancestor or most of their close relatives. Females are bigger too, twice as big as their precursors, but they lack the male's elaborate decoration. Striped plumage has been replaced with a solid warm brown feathering, fading to a soft white at the head. This color provides better camouflage in the tall grass of the stormveld, where these scroungers now make their homes. The stormveld is not a highly biodiverse biome, but a natural monoculture of plants with relatively low species diversity. But it makes up for this in supporting extremely large numbers of the species which do live here.

A highly gregarious species, great golden squaboons are nomads without territorial ties. Like their ancestor they are always found in very large groups; in their case, these can number in the tens of thousands of birds, and they often travel in wide lines, for this scatters insects and small prey animals ahead of the advancing herd and improves each one's foraging success. They are omnivores with the capacity to eat most things, but ultimately they graze on the grass more than anything, with everything else an opportunistic supplement to this base diet. The core social group is much smaller than the total herd size: a small tightly-bonded family group with bonds held and extended through female members. Within each vast herd there will be hundreds of such family units. Males are not permanent members of such a troop - adolescent ones leave their group after a couple years and form bachelor groups around the edges of larger gatherings. The bright color and display structures of male golden squaboons exists to court females, but these birds don't do so singly like their ancestors, would have but rather in cooperative clans. And these groups must do more than just look good. They must impress females not so much with their looks alone, but with proof that they will be good protectors. This species has evolved to have males work together in groups to challenge other males for the opportunity to run with female troops. Bachelor groups are often comprised of relatives, and so the success of one benefits the genes of all, which may be why this system remains successful.

But this sort of group living is complicated - to reproduce, a group of males must not only impress a troop of females, but also successfully usurp its current group of resident males if one is already in place, and this means not physically fighting them but successfully convincing the females that they will do a better job protecting them than their current males. It is not an easy task. Golden squaboon females will actively assist males they favor in conflicts with rival males, ensuring that their clans are not taken over by less competent troops. But their social life is rife with drama and coercion, bribery and gossip, and shifting alliances, and it is every male's sole goal in life to successfully join a breeding group, meaning that those who do not have one will go to any length to get access. To maintain their rights to a harem, an established pack of males has to continuously prove that they can use their height to the advantage of all the group, spotting all enemies long before any can threaten the females or their young. This is the main purpose of their larger size. And if mere vigilance is not enough, then the males must be willing to put their lives on the line to keep their young safe from harm. Working together, they use sharp talons to kick enemies and hooks on the inside of their tentacles to deliver brutal slashing bites. If they do well, then the females will remain allied to them. But rival males are not always good sports, and this righteous and kingly looking bird is in fact a master manipulator.

Working together, some members of an up and rising bachelor troop will challenge breeding males and lure them away from the main troop. Then others might seed chaos, broadcasting frantic alarm calls to scatter the females. In the resulting chaos, young can become lost, and if they can do so unnoticed, the rival males might selectively kill one or two of them, but kidnap at least one live chick unharmed. When the females return to find some of their young have been slain, they will blame not the rival, but the males of their own troop for failing to protect them. In their rage and sorrow, they may lash out. Now the rivals may return, carrying the live chick with a fake tenderness and returning it to its mother, manipulating the emotionally distraught females into thinking it has saved their young where their own males failed. It's a complex, sinister tactic, and a hard one to pull of successfully. But if they can get the females to turn against their resident males in their anger this way, and to falsely believe the rivals had altruistic motivations to help their young, then the result can be the exile of the former males and the acceptance of the new troop into the fold in their stead. Once a new male group has been allowed to join a female troop, they will indeed accept any young remaining as their own, for now they could not get away with doing away with any of them. But once they have bred with the females and sired new broods, the older young will be nearing independence anyway, and they can focus most of their efforts on the survival of their own chicks.

Not every transfer of power between males occurs after such drama - many are much more subtle. But nearly all are the result of manipulative tactics used by one male group against another; social politics is a way of life for males, and they have traded outright physical violence against each other for mind games, tricks, and deception to succeed and pass on their genes. Simply fighting their rivals cannot work when females are so much more closely allied and able to intervene and prevent outright takeovers. To succeed means gaining their favor first and foremost, for it is ultimately their will which dictates which males will breed and which will not. Unfortunately, as the two sexes' goals have diverged from each other, the males have learned to cheat the system. Constantly challenging other males in an endless game of politics, each male group typically spends just a couple years running with any single female band before they are displaced. This ensures very wide genetic diversity on a population level, if nothing else, as females never leave their birth troops. Regular shuffling of males between different bands and the fact that most males in the population reproduce at some point maximizes the combinations of genes which can occur in the young. The omnivorous diet of the great golden scrounger lets it take advantage of occasional opportunities but also to subsist mainly on grass, a virtually unlimited food source on the storm veld. This combined with its socially cohesive lifestyle means that outside rival males targeting young, it has few threats, and the largest population of any scrounger species by far: some 30 million of them roam the grasslands along the coastal edges of Serinaustra. They are far and away the continent's single most abundant megafaunal animal, and they form the biggest aggregations of any flightless Serinaustran bird during their non-breeding nomadic periods. But when breeding, they break off into much smaller groups.

Females in a group synchronize their breeding cycles so as to all lay their eggs at the same time; this can occur at any time of year, but is concentrated most often in the summer months. With such a large population, there are always some groups nesting, and different troops with overlapping cycles will naturally gravitate together to nest together for safety from predators, and afterwards may sometimes continue to travel together, for they will have become familiar. Two to three eggs are laid by each female annually; incubation takes six weeks, and this is the only time in which the groups are not nomadic, and thus also their most vulnerable time of life. The eggs hatch - almost all of them - in just two to three days into precocial long-legged young which can keep pace with the adults in just ten days, at which time the troop will rejoin the larger wandering herds. The similar ages of all young in a troop, or in several allied troops which nest together, allows them to be guarded in communal creches which travel in the middle of the adult groups where they are most protected from enemies. In such alliances where several troops cooperatively live near one another, there is generally no breeding of males from one band with females of another and likewise no aggressive competition between the different male groups within each troop. And while each group's politics are usually not interfered with by the others, even if they travel together, exceptions exist when there are young chicks being reared in one shared creche; all of the males will defend all of these intermingled chicks from any rivals outside their bonded herd, and with so many males to watch out for, these larger mixed herds are harder to usurp and so males within them may hold their positions longer than in the more common single-family group structure. This multi-family social unit is a relatively recent shift in the golden squaboon's social behavior, and it is very likely that it has evolved in response to the threat posed against the young by rival males. Living this way limits the opportunity for those rivals to harm the young, but in preventing new males from breeding, it also reduces genetic diversity. It remains to be seen whether this new way of living will continue to spread across the population, or whether this downside will ultimately mean it remains a relatively uncommon behavioral variation.

The dancing dunce is a large species of duikerduck murd that is common to the stormveld's tall grass plain, growing as large as 70 lbs but with females over twice the weight of males. The only member of its genus, it differs from its relatives with wedge-like, seed-splitting beaks in having a longer bill with a bulbous tip and a small hook. It feeds on a different diet, mostly upon buried roots and tubers as well as underground fungi, but will also sample eggs (especially from other burdles) and occasionally grubs and beetles that it comes across. Digging such morsels up with the beak as much as the sharp forearm claws, it can locate food out of sight with a strong sense of smell and often travels through thick grasses with its beak nearly touching the ground, scenting out its next meal. Most of the time they are cryptic and very shy animals, colored with a blotched green and brown hide that hides them against a grassy background. They almost never leave well-worn trails in the tall grass, and when they are seen it is for but a moment, like glimpsing a ghost. Hiding is how the dunce survives, avoiding the veld's many fierce predators by keeping a low profile. Though it has some defenses if cornered - namely its large, sharp claws - these ultimately do it little good against the largest carnivores it may encounter here like the dicax, probably its number one threat, or the skystalker that easily plucks it from the plain if it spots it. It is much better, for the dunce, to avoid ever being noticed.

The dunce, in contrast to its name, is not necessarily a stupid animal. It does not go looking for trouble and keeps to itself, usually avoiding unnecessary attention, and is generally a solitary animal that sticks to a small home range that may be only half a square mile. This is a testament to the productivity of this biome, where even such a small plot of land can provide all the food it could ever need. Where two dunces of any sex meet for most of the year, they will react aggressively, chattering noisily and trying to drive the intruder away, but females are so much bigger than males that they almost always dominate interactions, and the males must turn around and forage elsewhere if they meet one who is particularly obstinate. Though the dunce is not a brainiac among animals, or even among burdles, it is plenty intelligent to survive in an ecosystem rich in resources but also plagued with many dangers. This is is one of the most common herbivores in its environment, numbering perhaps 3.5 million across the rolling grassland in total at any one time. Though they are inconspicuous as they feed, scuttling along in hidden pathways out of sight, collectively these little creatures are as important to the stormveld as the wildebeest on the African savannah. Their digging keeps the soil loose and disturbed, providing places for new seedling plants to take root and for smaller animals to find soft soil to dig their own nests. By feeding on underground stores of energy and depositing dung on the surface some distance away, the cycle nutrients back throughout the system and prevent carbon from being locked up in the soil, which may eventually result in reduced productivity of the ecosystem. Dunces also serve an important part of the diet of a very broad range of other meat-eating animals, because in a given year, slightly over 50% of the adult population dies. No matter what.

That is not a typo. Dunces naturally undergo mass mortality every single year, and it is an event that predators eagerly await. Dunces, you see, are an animal that has evolved a very distinct life history. Females, so much bigger than males, are so because they are long-lived and may roam their small territories in the limitless plains for up to 25 years. Males, never approaching the size of their mates, are born with an hourglass ticking down at a much faster rate. They live only two years, and none survives to breed more than a single time. About 16 months of their lifespan is spent like the female - hiding, eating, and growing. And at that time, they resemble her identically. But when they reach sexual maturity they undergo a dramatic change that is impossible to miss. They take on an unmistakable dark blue coloration, and their grey beaks brighten to a radiant red. A dewlap on their chins swells and hangs down under their throats. They come out of cover, leaping up through the grass and chirping incessantly throughout day and night. Only one thing is now on the male dancing dunce's mind: securing a mate. And it is for this time in the male dunce's life that his whole species has been named. When the mating season grips him, he loses all sense. He barely eats, and no longer concerns himself with avoiding danger. All he does now is try to stand out, showing the depth of the color, the volume of his call and the size of his dewlap to any and all females who hide all around under cover, quietly peering out at each and every one but not yet approaching. If at this time one male spots a female, he will run at her and shriek and leap and do anything to be noticed, practically screaming her name and pointing at himself. He falls head over heels for her, impossible to overlook. Soon other males take notice and join him. They dance, and the spectacle cannot be missed. They shove and push and bounce and bowl each other over just for the chance to be near here. They are lovestruck and become as dumb as a box of hammers in her presence, seeing nothing but the chance to be with her. And yet still she ignores them, standing by as they are slaughtered by other animals that find them such easy pickings that they don't even notice her. For she is not yet ready.

From the start of the event, predators have meanwhile been very ready. They've already begun killing these no longer hidden dunces. This is not a tragedy, however, but nature's design. This is unfortunate to those individuals who are eaten at the start of the mating season, but it benefits those dunces who avoid the first hunt, for it reduces their competition. For days, hungry hunters pounce and prey on the suddenly visible swarm of over one million male dunces, and they gorge, and still the hoard of living chicken tenders that practically beg to be devoured does not stop coming out of the grasses in endless abundance. Within a few weeks, predators are gorged. They can take no more. They have already killed more than they can eat, and grow tired and fat. And now the female dunces peruse those many males still left, those which have run the gaunlet and survived. These last standing males are very attractive, and each such male is now visited by numerous partners. They pass on their genes in many directions, winners in the game of natural selection. And then, as the females quietly slip away back into hiding, the last males begin to weaken. They have spent weeks dancing and cavorting, and have fed themselves very little in the process. When the last females leave, carrying their lineage into the future, there is nothing more for the male dancing dunce in this lifetime. The end is the same, ultimately, for both the winners and losers in the game. They lie down, exhausted. Those that find a quiet, sheltered place will meet a quieter end than those who were struck down before them, but it is an end nonetheless. After less than 8 weeks since the first males appeared donning their bright blue coats, the last of them die. But in just another few weeks after that, the females carrying their descendants will give birth. Each one has up to eight young, and though only a few can ever be expected to reach adulthood with no care or protection from her once they arrive, at least enough to replace their fathers in the population will be sure to survive. It takes two years for the next generation of males to mature and join the event, but as females reproduce annually, there are males of different ages reaching adulthood every season. The sacrifice of the males each year provides safety for the females, reducing the risk of predation they face by overwhelming predators with food, at a time when those females would otherwise be more vulnerable. And similarly, their deaths vacate a million territories each year, allocating the paths they created in the grass and all of the food they would otherwise eat to the next generation, giving them an immense head start in life that they would otherwise lack. It's a strange, grim, and yet wondrous life strategy, ensuring the best chances of survival for their young in a world full of opportunity as much as it is full of risk. Only in such a rich ecosystem as the stormveld could such a system be possible.

False vulpynxes closely resemble their namesakes, especially at a distance. They are very tall, long-legged and big-eared foxtrotters found in grassland regions. But this genus of foxtrotter is only very distantly related - indeed, it is as distant as any trotter species could be from them, both genetically and spatially, for these creatures are endemic only to Serinaustra, an ocean away from the northern continent, and represent an independent lineage of southern foxtrotter that has evolved from the common ancestor of every other Serinaustran species. Their body shape is a straightforward example of convergent evolution, particularly with the plains vulpynx. But false vulpynxes never had a fishing ancestor - that role here was filled by the swampstilt lineage, no closer to the false vulpynx than any other southern foxtrotter is. Nor does the greater false vulpynx, the largest species, hunt any sort of large prey like the plains vulpynx does. It is firmly a mesopredator, despite its height, and it survives by hunting morsels small enough to swallow whole, and by avoiding the attention of larger, more dominant predators that rule this grassy ecosystem.

Greater false vulpynxes are solitary, their only social bonds between mothers and young. They have to be, for they survive by being elusive and remaining unnoticed, which is impossible in a group. They are silent and cautious, spending their lives stepping through grass taller than their heads, and they almost never cross clearings where the vegetation grows any shorter. Their own fur is striped vertically in shades of yellow and green, matching their background, and as in sawjaws and other similarly hued tribbetheres, this is owed to bile pigment in their hairs and skin. False vulpynxes are exclusively carnivorous, hunting murds, insects, and birds. They often leap several times their body length to rapidly make up the distance and pounce on their targets after a prolonged stalk, but they don't leap vertically if flying prey escapes upward as to do so would give away their location to the veld's bigger carnivores. Food is caught in the jaws, and the digits of the paws are shorter than many foxtrotters and suited to run rather than grasp. When threatened these foxtrotters are one of very few that will freeze before they fight or flee; they have very little scent as a result of meticulous grooming habits, and so they are often passed over by predators of their own. If they do find themselves pursued, they run with an unpredictable turning, weaving habit to try and ditch their chasers, and will often dash suddenly to one side, freeze motionless, and then double back on their tracks when their enemy keeps running ahead. In many ways, the greater false vulpynx is a fox that has become a hare. Both hunter and hunted, it runs a narrow line where to succeed is to kill without being killed in the process. Able to bear up to six young in a litter, most mothers ultimately raise only a single surviving kit; the most she can pick up in her jaws and run away with when her nest is discovered for the five to six weeks it takes for her young to be able to run away from danger with any competence on their own three feet.

Contemporary and currently coexisting with the greater false vulpynx is its diminutive cousin. Lesser false vulpynxes split from their sister species around 5 million years ago, as an ancestral form which was more alike the larger one was separated into two populations as one adapted to hunt in the interior forests while the other remained on the outlying grasslands. Over their time apart, that one changed more than its relative, developing much shorter legs, better suited to run through low-growing bushy vegetation. But not every evolutionary path lasts forever. About 2.5 million years ago, the new forest-dwelling species began to decline: they were exactly the right size to be a prime competitor with the squabgoblin, and filled similar niches: fast, ground-running pursuit predators. Most of them were extirpated, but a refuge still remained out of reach of scrounger sapients, and it was so that the last of the forest foxes made a final escape back out into the stormveld, into a sea of grass ruled by bigger, badder hunters that would keep their own foe at bay.

They would meet their sister species here again, and time had changed them both, removing former kinship. The greater false vulpynx was now an enemy too, big enough to dominate it, even to kill it in combat. So the lesser false vulpynx became smaller still, shrinking little by little over the eons. Doing so it became small enough that its cousin could now even prey upon it, but it would get little chance, for the little guy was now a master of evasive maneuvers. While the greater false vulpynx still had its own dangers to be wary of, the lesser was now so little - smaller than some chihuahuas - that the stormveld's huge ruling classes no longer noticed it at all, and it could run literal circles around the larger hunters of the region. Navigating a maze of intricate tunnel-highways carved out between the grass blades and the reeds, the lesser false vulpynx grew confident and bold. While its larger cousin had to weave silent through the tall stems, the lesser plows through the bases of the grass, always hidden under cover. Aggressive and persistent because it does not need to be so fearful, it now hunts mostly insects, feeding on potentially hundreds of small morsels in a day. Its narrow jaws slip easily between stems and stalks, snatching its meals from hidden places out of the larger foxtrotter's reach. Pairs often share a maze and den together, cooperating to rear their young, and more often they succeed in raising their whole litter to adulthood. It's an ancestral habit to pair up, one that the larger species has since had to drop. But these couples are not very inviting to others, and so each pair defends a surprisingly large territory from rivals.

Young ones that survive their childhoods must run a gauntlet of hostile neighbors to find an unclaimed territory of their own, and this limits their numbers during times with plentiful food. An ability to breed quickly to recover losses, along with an in-built control to prevent overpopulation that would deplete food resources, makes this species equally suited to stable conditions and to sudden changes in a way few species are. And it has made them very well suited, once again, to return to the forests their ancestors were born in and then driven away from. The modern lesser false vulpynx is small, smart, and resourceful, and can survive amongst the now much bigger squabgoblins that no longer perceive it as a pest. As populations overflow from their success on the stormveld, youngsters disperse inland, and the species is currently spreading quickly across the continent and reclaiming old territory as a forest species. Just like before, they have been changed by their time away. And if these populations too eventually cease to mix with those of the grassland, a third species is soon likely to diverge. 

The swayneck swoose is the smallest of the giraffowl that may be called "swooses" or "sweese" (or maybe "swice" or "swace" or another, secret fifth thing.) It is the only member of the genus Nutocollolorus, the nearest relatives to the marine swoose genus that includes species like the resplendent swoose. This is only the third sentence about this species, and already "swoose" sounds less and less like a word, but the swayneck swoose represents the last living member of an earlier offshoot of its lineage that has only a small number of traits retained in its adulthood to swim, and which spends most of its time on land. Though its juveniles (sometimes called swoslings) are flying ptoose-like birds, still favor wetlands and spend their first couple of years near water, mature swaynecks move onto the tall grass plains of the stormveld. There they fill a niche as grazers, though they are solitary (mainly to be less conspicuous to their predators such as the dicax and the skystalker. They do not gather in large herds, keeping a low profile as a rule, with a less vibrant plumage than related species that matches their surroundings better. The female is very "plain", colored mostly olive-green and brown from head to toe, but male does still show brightly colored semi-bare skin around its head and neck, and a small star-like pointed crest, though even his color is seasonal.

Males are very vibrant at certain times, yet the hue of their red and blue skin reduces significantly outside a two to three month courting season in the local winter, when day length in the more southerly parts of the veld they are most common is short, and so the amount of time he spends visible is limited to a few hours per day. In the long days of summer, his skin darkens to a gray hue, and even the bright keratin sheath over his crest dulls to a tan color. The crest sheds its outer layer once per year, in time for the mating season, revealing a vibrant new pattern of keratin underneath. Males track females by scent cues during the breeding season and several will compete by striking one another with their powerful necks in short, intense battles for a single mate, something that is necessary for her to accept any one of her suitors. The crests, in this situation, function like maces and males often come away from these contests with puncture wounds that occasionally result in lost eyes, if they are not careful to avoid the worst of each strike from their opponent. The most successful males are often the oldest and most experienced, and thus the most scarred, and some evidence suggests that evidence of healed head and neck injuries that prove one has survived many battles may themselves be a signal that females look for in a potential mate, proving he is very fit.

Named for their downward-arcing necks that keep them hidden beneath the height of the grass, adult swayneck sweeses are primarily grazers, though they still forage in shallow water, especially in the vicinity of Split River where the local race shows more webbing on its feet in adulthood to navigate this more seasonally flooded grassland. Juveniles are all semi-aquatic and behave much like waterfowl in their first, flighted year of life after they leave their mother's pouch. They become too large to fly by 12-15 months, and their wing fingers do not grow along with their body size, so that they eventually atrophy by the age of three. Adolescents in between juvenile and adult are more social, traveling in small bands that stay near wetlands and are quick to dash and splash into cover at the first sign of danger, but being preyed upon by a wide range of mid-sized carnivores. Only a small percentage become mature adults that then have fewer predators, mainly limited to the largest hunters of the region. Though the less protected adult females still prefer to slip away unseen at the first sign of danger, they can also defend themselves with strong backwards kicks of their hind legs when cornered; they and some other smaller giraffowl are also known to expel their immature pouch-young if under duress, potentially sacrificing their offspring to distract a predator and let them escape (and to have another litter at a later time.) Antlered males will also use their crests to bash enemies that attack them. Their necks are held down habitually to reduce their height and let them remain unseen, but are in fact highly mobile and can be swung upwards and to the side when the swoose defends itself, and a sudden upward thrust can provide a deterrence even to large aerial predators. The lowered posture maintained by the swayneck also protects it from lightning strikes, which are particularly dangerous in this open habitat without trees where long-necked animals can become lightning rods, making this one of only a few giraffowl that are found here, and the largest of those that are.

The fleetfoot is a primitive scansorial scrounger related most closely to the flouncet and like it, this animal has never had a climbing ancestor; they diverged at the very base of the scansorial clade's family tree 275 million years MPE. Standing two feet high and weighing only 20 or so pounds, a fleetfoot is a small animal but an efficient predator, being a hypercarnivore that hunts small and fast-moving prey animals. Though the fleetfoot slightly resembles the larger and related sprinther that is also a fast and agile predator, and while it sometimes coexists with it across Serinaustra's open grassland regions, it is adapted to hunt much smaller animals and is active exclusively by night, avoiding competition.

Fleetfoots are actually most closely aligned with sawjaws like the springheel more than any other scrounger, for they are specialist predators of songbirds. Fleetfoots don't hunt them out of the air, however, as often as they sneakily catch them in their sleep. Its sense of smell is excellent, and with it this small carnivore will seek out roosting birds as they rest hidden in the tall grass of the stormveld. When on the hunt they are slow, methodical, and silent; they slip unnoticed and unheard through thickets of grass, probing quietly with their tentacled faces. The left and right tentacle in this species are much longer than the top, which sits mostly stationary between the two like a long snout, while the lower is vestigial and scarcely more than a lip. Their nostrils open inwards and down, and in being placed between the tentacles and so near the mouth the animal can combine its senses of smell and taste; the fleetfoot uses its the mucous membranes on the inner edges of its tentacles, just next to the beak, as an enlarged nasal cavity and with this semi-external nose can pick up even the feintest trace scents and follow them to their source with an acuity like that of a bloodhound. Patiently stalking closer, it can sneak up ever nearer on a bird asleep in the grass and then, in a sudden rush of lightning-fast motion, snatch it from its perch with its paired tentacles. The beak is unusually exposed, for the lower tentacle is almost entirely absent, and this strange bird does not so much chew its food as simply bite it rapidly and repeatedly to cause quick death before swallowing it almost entirely intact.

Unlike flouncets, fleetfoots are mostly solitary animals with diets of small, scattered morsels that can only support single individuals. But they do come together in pairs to breed, and while the female will have to raise two to three chicks on her own in the end, the male will bring her food until the chicks have hatched, allowing her to brood the eggs without becoming malnourished and from being left unable to hunt. A single highly mobile and very long head feather present on both male and female is uncommonly complex, with a banner-like flare at its tip; very few other scroungers have such an elaborate feather structure, for most of their plumage is simple and hair-like. The purpose of the plume in males is to be visible above the grass to females when they croon their clattering call, inviting interested potential partners to find them hidden away in the grass. Females use their plume differently, as a signal to help their chicks keep close to them in similar low visibility conditions. Young grow up fast, for most hunting skill for them is instinctive and there is little they must learn; they may become independent in only four months and fully mature in ten. Females can breed up to twice in a year. This contrasts sharply to many other scroungers in which childhood is more prolonged and cultural behaviors are passed down from parent to offspring.

The dicax is one of the apex predators of the stormveld, where it has few rivals on the ground here for this role. Dicax are a descendant species of mordax, slightly smaller and leaner, which makes up for less brute strength with greater speed, endurance, and social cooperation. A pack hunter - though usually only working in family groups of 2-6 - they are predators of the mumps and the other robust grassland trunkos most frequently, as well as occasionally preying on immature giraffowl. Lumpelopes, small and quick, are rarely on the menu for this predator which favors prey closer to its own size and not quite as swift. Olive-green banded fur, colored with bile pigments as in some sawjaws, hides them well in the tall grasses of the rainplain and lets them sneak close upon the grazing herds before they give chase. Then they flank the group, snapping at the stragglers until they can focus their attention on the weakest link.

A hooked thumb claw can be used to trip up their prey, bowling it over so that it can be quickly dispatched in the powerful bone-shattering jaws, built more like those of a crocodile than a dog, cat, or other large earth predator. The wide gape produces a slightly disconcerting expression on the dicax's face, a sarcastic smile in which the lips naturally angle just slightly upward at its cheeks while its eyes always appear emotionless, a blank stare that never gives much insight into its real emotional state. Is it content or aggressive? It is not easy to tell, for a dicax doesn't give away its intentions. Its glare is a weapon of its own; prey which doesn't immediately run, but instead circles around their young and tries to fight off the danger, is stared down with these unrelenting eyes until one shows the slightest fear, and that is usually the one they target.

The pack makes quick work of an entire animal, eating everything from feathers to bone in large, greedy mouthfuls, and leaves nothing for other scavengers. Their large size compared to their prey means they must hunt most days, and they are always on the move, staying to one den site only when their pups are very young. Groups are not strongly territorial, but instead defend kills from each other while sharing the landscape at different times. They scavenge readily and are the most strongly specialized bone-eating animals of the southern continent, eating parts few other species will utilize. Even long limb bones are often only split once, then swallowed largely intact; powerful stomach acid makes short work of them, and the marrow is an important calorie source.

The dicax is an intelligent predator, and like many such animals, it is capable of cooperation outside the lines of its own species. Like northern sawjaws, it sometimes works in tandem with pickbirds to locate vulnerable prey. In particular, it is often seen in association with the sham pickbird, which is named for its deceptive display of injury that it uses to lure smaller, solitary predators to waiting dicax lying in ambush. In doing so, it not only removes a threat to itself and its own young, but also feeds the dicax, a strange yet effective arrangement for both parties. Because of the pickbird's help, dicax don't eat them and tolerate the pickbird feeding among them, grabbing choice, softer scraps before the pack eats all that remains.

But the pickbird is just one of the birds with which this foxtrotter has developed a working relationship...

Above: two dispersing ascendant squabgoblins, Trucidator ascensus, cower meekly hidden in the tall grass, and hope they are not discovered after finding themselves amongst a multitude of huge, frightening creatures that do not have any fear of them. Having left the clan of their birth, this pair have wandered far from their homelands in search of another clan which may welcome them, but in their travels they have left the safety of the forests and entered the uncharted wilderness that is the stormveld. This is a region that their kind, dominant elsewhere across the southern continent, have not managed to get a foothold.

On the stormveld, just as in the north, it is the southern race of the imperial skystalker, Grallacheiropteryx polydactylus impetus, which rules an open, boundless land with no dense growth of trees to exclude its wide wingspan. The ultimate predator of the region and perhaps the world, it influences every other species which coexists with it from the smallest to the largest in a complex web of interactions. For some, like an unfortunate mump calf clutched in one of its talons, the skystalker is death incarnate, a hunter always stalking from above. Yet even without trees here, the grazing prey can use the tall grass as a maze to escape it, if they are cautious and quick. It is much more difficult to be a predator here, for the skystalker is quick to hone in on the scent of a meal - even one hidden from its sight - and can steal a hard-earned kill from almost anyone here, least of all the comparatively tiny squabgoblin. This is no place for it, and these lost adolescents will turn back the way they came, finding the unexplored world they have found too wild and uncontrolled. Because of the skystalker, the stormveld becomes Serinaustra's last frontier untouched by their influence.

But the southern skystalker is not the stormveld's only predator. Others do exist here, because the skystalker allows them to. Hunters like the dicax could not face the skystalker and win, especially when it gathers in pairs or even in larger groups. If their relationships were purely those of rivals, then the dicax would lose. But it is tiring, for everyone, to fight, and to fight once means to be enemies indefinitely, lest one eventually lose out completely and disappear from the landscape completely. This might be good enough for the winner, but it's a lot of work to exterminate your enemies outright, and in the interim its more vulnerable individuals - the young especially - will still remain threatened by those rivals at any time they are unsupervised. So the skystalkers here have come up with a very different solution to the enemy problem. Why have enemies at all, if you can make your rivals into your allies for a comparatively small cost? On the stormveld, this population of skystalker has ingeniously formed a cooperative working relationship with the dicax by allowing these foxtrotters to hunt on its lands, in exchange for protecting its nests and chicks when it is out hunting. Lacking any high elevation sites on which to brood their pupal young or raise their young chicks, the skystalkers of the stormveld must nest on the ground, and this means their nests are unusually vulnerable to predation. The dicax is the solution the skystalker has found to this problem; they will guard the great birds' nests when it leaves, and they will then deter any smaller enemies that can hide in the grass, ambush its young, and slip away before the larger skystalker can react. This arrangement, in which the dicax do not threaten the young skystalkers - if only, at first, for fear of certain death if they do - allows both members of a skystalker pair to go out hunting and patrolling their territory together. This, in turn, protects the dicax further, as these pairs aggressively defend their lands from other forms of skystalkers which have no qualms about killing the dicaxes themselves, and from stealing every last kill they make. Smart enough to realize that positive reinforcement is a more reliable motivator than fear alone, the wisest skystalkers reward their nest guardians with substantial scraps that keep them eager to help out in exchange for more. The mump calf this hunter carries back toward its nest is not for its young at all, for the chicks are already fed. It is payment to the guards that patrol around the nesting ground, keeping the chick safe as the parents are away. Like loyal dogs excited by the return of their master, they rise from the grass in anticipation of the skystalker's return. It drops the carcass into their waiting jaws, and they make short work of it as a mother returns to tend to her chick, who fears little now thanks to its parents' ingenious solution to the conflicts of life in the wild.

As generations of both skystalkers and dicax grow up in close contact with each other, their relationships have evolved from strictly business interactions controlled by threat into truly symbiotic ones in which both species benefit from the other's presence, and in which genuine social bonds can develop between individuals which may last a lifetime. This now extends to cooperative interspecies defense against mutual enemies; a powerful eye in the sky combined with a strong ground-based force makes for an unmatched array. It is through coordination of both species that the stormveld is kept unoccupied by certain predators like the huge and vicious crossjaws, which are unwilling or incapable of understanding the culturally-passed-on social rules that these species have set amongst each other, and thus pose a grave threat to them both. The skystalkers alone can not kill such huge, fierce adult animals, or deter them from developing breeding populations on the stormveld. But with the more numerous dicax to assist them as a ground-based army, they have better success. The dicax hunt out and kill any dispersing crossjaw young in the grass where the skystalker cannot easily track them, while the skystalkers - even rival pairs - rally together in large groups to fight a common enemy when an adult crossjaw rarely enters the stormveld from adjacent forests to the inland of the continent, harassing it endlessly and preventing it from successfully hunting. These two allied apex predators have further shaped the stormveld ecosystem to suit their needs while rendering it far from ideal for larger land-based hunters, meaning that fewer and fewer crossjaws attempt to colonize the region as time goes on. There are no giant herbivores native to this unusual region, meaning no food source to reliably support adults of the largest land carnivores. This is because the hunting of the skystalker and dicax over millions of years has resulted in a finely-tuned array of mainly comparatively small, fleet-footed prey which can better avoid enemies in the tall grass, and which are much too elusive for something as big as the atrocious crossjaw to catch. A lack of trees further prevents the establishment of the large giraffowl which crossjaws are most adapted to feed on. The stormveld exists as a unique entity in the world as much from the direct influence of these two allied predators as it does to the unique weather conditions of this wind-swept and storm prone region. It is the only Serinaustran biome which has been shaped and changed directly by its most intelligent animal species in a way which benefits the continent's overall biodiversity, rather than reducing it purely for the short-term benefit of a single species. There is nowhere else quite like it in the hothouse world: the stormveld is possibly the pinnacle of large-scale cooperative ecology which first began to appear among the higher vertebrate animals over 40 million years ago.

The sham pickbird is a relatively large member of its group of primitive hothouse chatteravens, broadly known for their long beaks and symbiotic relationships with larger species (usually cleaning them of parasites.) Sham pickbirds are one of the most terrestrial species in their clade, for they weigh as much as a bald eagle but have relatively small wings, meaning flight is tiring and difficult for them to sustain for long duration. They much prefer to run on the ground, snapping their long bills at anything small that they come across that might make a good meal, and only take flight when they absolutely must. This is a good lifestyle for finding many small animals in the tall grass that they like to eat (such as murds), but it also puts them into greater risk of encountering lurking predators of their own. They are social birds with keen sight, so traveling in family groups makes it harder to any hunter to sneak up upon them. But when they do detect a threat, the pickbird does not simply take flight and run from the danger. No, it has another plan. Why escape danger today just to face it again tomorrow, the pickbird asks. This intelligent little bird is more forward thinking than that...

When a pickbird flock has spotted a threat, females will quickly lead away the adolescents and flee for cover, while the adult males stay behind. More colorful than their female counterparts, their feathers shimmer with iridescence and their head are boldly painted in yellow and gold. And on their wings, a vibrant, sanguine spot of crimson red appears like a fresh, dripping wound against the dark blue background. It appears to run like fresh blood down their primary feathers, and to pool at their tips. As long as a hunter is visible, it is no risk to them. So they begin a ruse. They chirp and squawk, running with a staggered, limping gait and dragging one of their red-splashed wings in a most dramatic manner, as if gravely wounded. They run a short distance, stop and start again, doing everything they can to trigger a predatory chase in whatever creature stalks them. And when it does follow, they keenly keep just far enough ahead of it to keep its interest, always running just a little faster. They lead it a little further... a little more... just a tad more... and then, miraculously, they appear to recover from all their injuries and flush upwards above the grass in a sudden flurry of wingbeats. Their pursuer stares up gobsmacked, for a moment entirely unaware of its own surroundings. When the pack of dicax converge around it from their hiding places in the grass, it has nowhere to run. They, along with the southern imperial skystalker, rule this region undisputed. And they devour it, getting rid of another potential competitor for themselves or their offspring, and removing another threat the pickbird will no longer have to fear. The pickbird has learned to work with the dicax to benefit both parties; the meals it brings to its partners are more worth the effort to kill than the pickbird itself, and so the dicax don't harm the pickbird - they know there will be more to eat if they leave it alone, and let it bring them dinner every so often willingly. Indeed, they often share part of what they kill with it, letting the pickbird benefit greatly from the association and to fill a niche more like a far larger carnivore than it could on its own.

But this is not the end of the sham pickbird's remarkably complex interspecies social behavior. Too small and wary to be a very worthwhile meal to the skystalker that often associates with the dicax, the sham pickbird often becomes habituated to this predator too. The more friends in higher places it has, the safer it becomes. A flock of pickbirds that are accepted by both the dicax and the skystalker will be virtually immune to all danger, and will be able to rely on those animals to keep all other threats away from their nests. It doesn't happen always, and it isn't always quick, but little by little the pickbirds will push their luck, getting closer and closer to the skystalkers' own nest. They may bring small tidbits of food as a peace offering, and they may also bring sticks and suitable nesting materials. They want to be seen as harmless, even useful to their larger "friends", so that they may ultimately be tolerated in their most preciously guarded sanctuaries: the nests in which they raise their own precious chicks. This is the safest of all places on the stormveld, under the wings of its most feared and dominant ruler. Only once a pack of pickbirds has pacified the great "dragons" and become allied to them, then will they burrow out a nest of their own beneath the massive, stacked pile of plant debris and bones that the skystalker pairs use to rear their own offspring for generations. Here their chicks will grow up fully protected, and as the pickbirds ravenously collect any and all scraps and insects around the nest to feed them, they clean the skystalker's nest of trash and parasites that would reduce their own survival rate without this help. Not all sham pickbirds live in such high social standing on the stormveld, but once a flock has infiltrated the ranks in this way it will usually hold its place for generations, even as old members pass away and new ones are born to take their place. Three distinct species each living in harmony and aiding the survival of one another in their own different ways, this is one of the most remarkable situations of multi-species cooperation that has yet been seen on the world of birds. As the hothouse comes to a close and the world becomes colder again, this sort of community that can improve the odds of all its members versus any one alone will remain a reliable strategy to survive. The players may change as one era gives rise to the next, but the game of life remains the same, and similar strategies will continue to pay off in this ever-increasingly interconnected world in which they all live.

This very handsomely marked rhynchodon aukvulture is a midsized flying predator, a strong flier with narrow, maneuverable wings that is equally quick on four feet, loping along like a hyena in order to hunt for small prey in the tall grass, until and unless some larger animal comes after it and it swiftly launches itself skyward to safety. Usually traveling in mated pairs, they cooperate to chase animals like murds from their hiding places, one member pouncing through thick tussocks of grass, and another catching critters as they make a run for it, and they scavenge from kills made by other animals too. They are joined at times by up to six young, forming temporary packs from the time their chicks begin to fledge the nest around 8 weeks of age, until they disperse around nine to twelve months. Some young may spend as long as two years with their parents and contribute to rearing the next brood of chicks.

Imperynchs are closely related to the rhynchodog, a relationship that is not easily discerned through appearance alone. Rhynchodogs are natural dwarves with highly shortened limbs, rendering them flightless - a trait that benefits them in their thick, closed forest habitat - and greatly altering their body shape. The imperynch represents a more ancestral condition for the genus both species belong to, with long legs, a slender build, lengthy tail feathers, and a head that is comparatively smaller in size though still equipped with a powerful biting jaw that they can use to bring down prey slightly bigger than themselves, though they aren't especially inclined to do this unless very hungry. Their most preferred way to eat is the easiest one, which is to follow skystalkers and the dicax as an uninvited entourage and help themselves to the banquet they bring home, darting down to snatch a bite and dashing away before they get caught. They have acquired traits that encourage skystalkers to tolerate them, mainly by having learned to mimic skystalker chicks, especially the specific tone of their chirps, but also characteristic open-beaked, head-shaking movements that are used by the chicks to solicit food from their parents. This may make the imperynch appear "cute" to adult skystalkers in the way a cat's cry-like meow serves to cause humans to tend to it as they would a human baby, and makes them more willing to let it share their food. In extreme cases, some skystalkers will directly feed the imperynch beak to beak, possibly grieving parents which may have recently lost their own offspring. 

The imperynch's plumage is likely an example of mimicry too, but not necessarily for the same purpose, or at least for only the same reason. It is quite distinct from the banded, camouflaging ones of others of their genus, and has come to share many patterns with the skystalker, especially the contrasted pale head and neck and dark eye stripe. A dark margin is present on the wing, though only along the inner edge of the propatagium, not the outer edge like in the skystalker, and a small patch of green to blue feathers sits near the elbow in the same approximate location of the skystalker's similar marking. The dark eye markings in particular may contribute to the imperynch's imitation act of a skystalker's own young, but it is harder to fool them with an imperfect mask than it is with a more perfectly replicated voice. Their similar color patterns are more often used to intimidate other rival predators that may recognize the basic strokes of the pattern as those of the skystalker but are not able to discern the clear differences, and thus giving the small imperynch much more respect than it would earn on its own. This may not be because another animal fears a skystalker as small as the imperynch itself, but because it, like the skystalkers themselves, may mistake it for a skystalker chick. The chick, of course, is quite harmless on its own. But where there is a skystalker chick, there will be extremely protective parents nearby. Exploiting their resemblance to the precious baby of the stormveld's ultimate ruling predator, imperynchs have their cake and eat it too, gaining tolerance from the skystalker itself as well as exploiting a case of mistaken identity to garner the fear and respect of other, larger animals which could otherwise overpower the imperynch and pose it very real threat. For this crafty rhynchodon, it's a very successful survival strategy and has let it find a secure niche on the stormveld, a highly competitive ecosystem governed by animal aliances, where navigating the complex social politics of other species in one way or another is no longer optional if you are to survive. Wherever some relationships are founded in mutual give and take, others like the imperynch will find ways to exploit this for only their own gain. For now, their ruse is working, but they must run a narrow line of success, for if they become too numerous, then all of the other players they're currently fooling in the game of life might grow wise to their tricks. There have never been such multi-layered, behaviorally complex interactions across the food chain as there are now at the end hothouse: a world once divided black and white into predators or prey, and "us" or "them" is now a world colored in shades of gray. This might make life more complicated, but it also means there have never been more possible solutions to the problems life poses, as long as you are clever enough to solve the puzzle in your own way.

The pygmy brushtrotter is a foxtrotter near the bottom of he stormveld food chain, unlike its distant dicax cousin. It is a true scamp, but a very close relative to them, which diverged 277 million years P.E. from the white-tipped brushtrotter, which was very close to the ancestor that evolved into both the scamp and watertrotter lineages of foxtrotter. While most true scamps are arboreal and resemble lemurs, the pygmy brushtrotter is still quite comfortable on the ground, though in no way unable to climb. It is very small, like a tarsier or a bushbaby, and today can be found only within the stormveld, where it lives in family groups and makes communal nests in the protective cover of tall grass. Up to twenty such creatures will cooperatively maintain several closely set nests, woven from reeds and suspended several feet above ground in very dense cover, and all of the adults in such a group assist in protecting and feeding their litters of young.

An omnivore, the pygmy brushtrotter eats mostly insects but also grass seeds, flowers, birds and their eggs, and occasionally carrion. They forage in troops, vigilant for danger, and their travels take them up and down the stalks of the tall grasses and down around their roots in search of food. When threatened, either at home or when on the move, the troop scatters in every direction, and each adult grabs the nearest infant and carries it away. Groups reconnect when the danger passes, and may have to rebuild their nests several times a month as larger grazers pass through and destroy them. This does not seem a major problem to the pygmy brushtrotter, which seems to take joy in the process. Instinctively driven to weave twigs together from a young age, nest building is a skill built on practice, and it takes about a year until a youngster can do so well.

Despite their small size, this foxtrotter has small litters, usually of just two young, though it may have up to four such litters in a year. The pups are highly dependent on parental care and can do little more than cling to an adult and cry for the first few weeks, but they quickly become mobile, so that by three months of age they are able to feed themselves in time for mom to have another litter. After this time they are protected by the rest of the troop, and forage for their own meals with the adults, though if they are struggling their fathers or other relatives will often still share a morsel with them. Full adulthood is reached within a year, and the life expectancy is around three or four, with most individuals eventually dying from predation. Even so, exceptionally wary, clever individuals can reach up to eight years of age. Such elders can be pivotal in helping their groups to survive by remembering old food sources and knowledge of different threats, and often ascend naturally to a very dominant role in the group, which permits them to feed first.

Defined by its frequent high-intensity tropical storms, the stormveld supports few trees. In their place the grass grows to great heights, flexing under heavy winds without breaking. Most animal species of the veld are small and quick; they flee the worst of the weather. The largest winged creatures, like the skystalker, rise into the air and ascend above the storms to dizzying heights where their deadly winds don't reach. All others must find cover in the grasslands themselves, protected from the wind that could carry then away in tunnels and nests nestled down among the stalks. Some species go so far as to wrap themselves with long, fibrous grass blade to anchor themselves near the ground. But not all species run or hide from the sky when it grows angry and dark. The tempest dag, one of this region's largest herbivores, sits out the storm in the open, unafraid.

Tempest dags can grow to weigh 1,200 pounds, and are the biggest member of the digdag lineage of burdles, related closely to such species as the crown of thorns and more distantly to species like the creeping clutchclaw. They are enormous and armored, their bodies covered in bony scutes that render them impervious to attack by any native predator as adults and contribute to their heavy weight. They are knuckle-walkers with much longer arms than legs, which appear to to climb forward with long reaching movements with each step. Their wrists are long and angled backwards when bearing weight, and so they move only very slowly; a top speed can be sustained of just 4 miles per hour. Yet this is plenty, as the food they require is in no short supply, and there are no hunters here to pursue them, for only such giants as crossjaws could ever even potentially manage to turn one over to kill it, and the skystalkers and dicax keep such foes from establishing here. They are grazers first and foremost, eating mostly grass and roots, but will feed on anything they come across, including smaller animals that have been killed by storms. Tempest dags themselves are impervious to the hurricanes, for they sit low to the ground and as such cannot easily blow over. When the weather turns, they simply turn into the wind and sink their spade-like forearm claws into the soil to anchor themselves. The gales blow right over them as they hunker down and wait it out. Their armor defends them from wind-blown debris as well as from predators' teeth. The pinnacle of their scutes rise as a headdress from the back of their head, a crown of seven long horns longest in males, which protects the small vulnerable area where the head attaches to the neck from injury from behind.

Though male tempest dags live singly - and as such, have slightly more impressive armor than the female - mothers and their young live in groups for defense. As many as 50 females may move together in herds, chopping the grass low to the ground and leaving a wake of disturbed muddy ground in their wake. It may seem to be desolation, yet they perform a vital role in maintaining the vigor of the plain by allowing new seedlings to take root without competition from established plants. Though in this region no predator readily threatens a healthy adult dag of either sex, the young are vulnerable for several years. To increase their odds, mothers keep them very close, almost always touching her, and groups surround their young when potential enemies are near. They do not simply form rings around their calves, however, for this would leave a blind spot that flying predators - like the skystalker - would exploit. To defend them, the adults will instead rear up on their squat hind legs and lean on one another with their lengthy grappling arms, forming a protective cage under which the young are sheltered on all sides. They turn their backs to the outside of the group, where ridges of spikes along their backs and thighs are impervious to bites, while shaking their heads back and forth so as to swipe their crests at enemies flying overhead, preventing any from striking into the group and grabbing a calf. The digdag clade of burdles include the best mothers of all burdles, and the young tempest dag grows up slowly. It is not fully independent of its mother's care until it is almost ten years old, its long childhood a testament to her skill in keeping it safe from danger. The result is a very slow reproductive rate, but with a lifespan of at least 120 years, each mother has a lot of time to raise several young in her life. Living its life on a slow and steady burn, and confident in its ability to withstand all the world can throw at it, the tempest dag has no need to rush. It is a life that would surely be enviable to many, especially in a place like the stormveld, where most herbivores must always be on the move, always running from enemies as much as from the unpredictable heavens above that can turn a sunny day to a cyclone with just a few minutes' notice. After every major storm, the tempest dags are among the first to find the unlucky creatures that did not make it through. One's ultimate loss is another's windfall, and carrion is quickly claimed, a high-energy meal that such a slow animal could never catch except for such chance opportunities.

This species was written and illustrated by Troll Man.

On the Serinaustran continent, where no thorngrazers and giant skuorcs exist to mow down the endless jungles that spread across the landmass during the beginning of the hothouse era, the vast majority of the land remains heavily carpeted in forest. Only the windswept lands of the stormveld, constantly battered by coastal cyclones and inundated by heavy seasonal flooding, remain relatively free of tree cover. However, the very largest herbivores are not found here. Huge predatory canitheres and archangels dominate this habitat, and the dense grass frequently towers metres above the ground in the perpetually humid climate. Here, only herds of smaller, fleet-footed herbivores thrive, and of these the lumpelopes and their closest relatives ecologically dominate this region, occurring in vast numbers in this habitat (which can sometimes be difficult to tell due to the height and density of vegetation). From the initial forest-dwelling lumpelopes evolved the horned lumpelopes; now having to blend in to other members of large roaming herds, they've largely abandoned the vibrant facial colours of the forest lumpelopes and have instead doubled-down on elaborate headgear, with numerous keratinous growths erupting from their heads.

One of the most common herbivore species native to the stormveld region is the six-horned lumpelope, an archetype member of the group. These live in dense, mixed-sex congregations frequently several hundred strong, sometimes even into the thousands, and often spread over several square miles as they forage throughout the grasslands, often mixing with herds of other grazers like squaboons, smaller giraffowl species, or other types of lumps. A selective grazing animal, they primarily feed on fresh shoots, shrubs, and forbs growing between the taller grasses, and the herds roam the lands perpetually searching for new pastures and following the weather patterns, staying out of range of the powerful maelstroms that frequently batter the landscape. Moving about is one thing the lumpelopes are very good at, as they are excellent endurance runners, have slim bodies that move easily through the dense grasses, but retain broad feet for spreading their weight through the routinely soft soil and mud. At full sprint, they can reach speeds of over 70 kph and sustain this for nearly two minutes, allowing them to outrun even the dive-bomb strike of the skystalkers that rule this environment, given a few precious seconds of warning beforehand. Even hatchlings less than a day old have little trouble running and keeping up with the adults, and require minimal care from birth.

Adults reach about six to eight feet in height, and weigh about 90 to 120 kilograms, with males being slightly larger in size on average, although they are otherwise very similar in build. Although both sexes possess the large horns that give the species its name, these are much longer and straighter in males. These are largely porous inside and poorly suited for physical combat, functioning mostly just for display; they grow throughout the animal's life (with the growth slowing as the adult reaches skeletal maturity), but in older adults they tend to be worn down or snapped off at the ends due to being used as foraging or scratching tools. Adults are very unlikely to use their horns to fight one another, preferring to use mock charges or kicks in disputes (a kick from an animal capable of running over 70 kph is quite effective at sending the obvious message in one go). In adolescents still growing out their horns, they are more likely to use them physically in play fights amongst one another, as they are always eager to test out the limits of their newly appearing facial appendages. As a last resort, they may be used as backwards stabbing weapons against a pursuing predator closing in on them, but this is obviously a rare case.

This species was written and illustrated by Troll Man.

The largest of all the lumpelopes is an ultra-robust powerhouse, bristling with muscle, with reinforced bones, and thick keratinous plates covering its face. While most lumpelopes retain their facial horns and stiffened flanges merely for display purposes, the subgroup of lumpelopes, known as the crowned lumpelopes, themselves descended from the grassland lumpelopes has repurposed them into durable weapons. Bony cores within their horns, outer layers of enlarged scutes, thickened skulls, and layers of skin that can be several centimetres deep protect themselves from powerful impacts. Over millions of years, this produced an extremely heavily-built lumpelope, the macehead, which stands up to ten feet tall and weighs over four-hundred kilograms. In a way, this is a lumpelope which has converged upon the much more massive horned lumps that share its environment, although it hasn't gotten quite that specialized, and is still capable of galloping at great speeds over large distances.

Due to being focused on physical prowess to impress females more than colourful plumage and skin tones, crowned lumpelopes have very little sexual dimorphism for lumpelopes and are generally dull-coloured. The female macehead lumpelope is only about 10-15% smaller than the male and has smaller horns and flanges, and more or less simply resembles a subadult male. Rather than ram each other head-on, males battle by swiping at each other with side-to-side blows to each other's flanks and necks, slamming into the other with their hardened, plate-like facial flanges. They are adapted to sustain such blows in sustained combat, in which duels can last over an hour for more evenly matched opponents, without serious injuries, but this doesn't mean the strikes aren't painful and the battles aren't exhausting for every party involved. To avoid combat whenever necessary, males will thoroughly measure each other up, observing health, stature, size, and the broadness of the other's facial ornamentation, to make sure it won't be a waste of time and energy to get into a fight; the lead-up to a fight can frequently be lengthier than the fight itself. The oldest and most experienced males, sometimes over thirty years old, often have worn down, faded, and broken spines from decades of battles, marks of proficiency able to ward off all but the most foolhardy rivals on sight.

Like other lumpelopes, maceheads are generally polygamous, but have relatively small harems, due to how much more strenuous it is to protect them from combative rivals. The most common breeding males tend to be brothers (usually pairs or trios), due to the insurmountable advantage of superior numbers in courtship fights. Kin selection trumps fairness in a fight, where a "duel" becomes a two-on-one, if it means a pair of slightly weaker males can win the right to mate in a battle against a single stronger male. Brothers can also hold mock fights to impress females, duelling one another in flashy brawls that aren't nearly as exerting as a real fight, but look impressive to other lumpelopes. However, single males may still win over a lone mate in a monogamous pairing, although takes more than simply impressing a female with his physical strength and he'll have to suck up to her over a period of weeks, or even months, by grooming her, defending her from rivals, feeding her, and staying by her side, before she might decide to take him as her mate. However, outside of mating, females are actually the dominant members within the herd, with a elder matriarch making most of the group's decisions and males generally trailing at the back of the group while on the move. Although the harems are smaller (rarely numbering more than eight), males of the species put great care into rearing their young, taking part in brooding eggs and protecting the chicks from predators. This sort of adaptation likely, at least in part, came about due to the macehead's greater size (compared to other lumpelope species) meaning it takes them longer to reach adult size, necessitating lengthier gestation periods and postnatal development to ensure their survival after independence.

For maceheads, it takes upwards of four to five years for a chick to reach sexual maturity, and it may be another year or two before it actually leaves its natal herd (as adult males remain tolerant of male offspring until their cranial horns fully develop).

As a grassland lumpelope, the macehead is expectedly common in savannah and grassland areas, although it isn't so absolute in its environmental preferences and can also be found foraging in woodland and wetland regions. Due to its larger size and broad frame allowing for a more spacious digestive system, the macehead can consume and readily extract nutrients woodier and more fibrous vegetation, as well as reaching higher into shrubs and trees, than other lumpelopes; it's not uncommon to see them pulling down and gnawing on whole branches. As a result of these slight dietary differences, it is common to see smaller lumpelope species foraging and migrating alongside the maceheads, which are also afforded better vantage heights to spot predators. Although maceheads, like other lumpelopes, default to fleeing when faced with a threat, against smaller predators, they may actually choose to fight if their young are targeted. Although the maceheads themselves are built to withstand blows from other maceheads without serious injury, a swipe of its head can easily crack the bones of a similar-sized animal of another species or send a human-sized creature airborne.

This species was written and illustrated by Troll Man.

Many species of lump have experimented independently with augmenting their facial flanges with offensive and defensive weaponry, battling one another for mating rights and territorial disputes, or presenting walls of bony plates and bristling spines against the fearsome hunters that share their world. The robust hoglumps are undeniably the most widespread and impressive of this lot, but some of the gracile lumpelopes have developed formidable armaments of their own. Although most have keratinous flanges for purely or mostly display purposes, the crowned lumpelopes have strengthened these into bulky and reinforced facial weapons that can withstand sustained combat many times over an animal's lifetime. While there are a number of species with varying forms and styles of facial weaponry, one species has evolved what is among the most fortified facial ramming weapon of any avian (only rivalled by some species of contemporary horned lumps). The aptly-named hammerhead lumpelope's dorsal flanges have hardened and broadened into huge, solid masses of bone and keratin several inches thick and fused directly to their skulls, while smaller knobs of fused osteoderms cover the face and lower pair of flanges, and callused plates and scutes cover its neck and facial tentacle. Highly temperamental, they will waste little time hurling themselves face-first at adversaries to test their mettle, as well as how well their brains are cushioned from injury. 

Smaller than the closely related macehead lumpelope (generally within a range 500-650 lbs and about five feet at the shoulder, with males average around 8-10% larger than females), the hammerhead is nonetheless even more ferocious and built for battle, able to dish out and withstand blows with regularity that would crack a macehead's bones and rupture organs. The ligaments that connect its neck vertebrate are partially ossified, maximizing energy transfer when it sideswipes with its skull (at the cost of much more limited side-to-side neck mobility, beyond the base of the neck). The sounds of two rival lumpelopes sparring often echo for miles on a clear day, as they swipe at one another with more force than a sledgehammer being swung, over and over. The booming collisions can be so loud that the lumpelope can momentarily shut its earholes during these fights to avoid inflicting hearing damage on itself. The lumpelopes are also not afraid to utilize their headgear against predators, even those twice as large as themselves; herds will band together and aggressively mob potential threats, as their front sides are much more well-defended than their backsides, able to easily withstand the slashing claws, beaks, or teeth of many aggressors. Aiming for the legs and chests, it's not unheard of for an unprepared skuorc, carver, or canithere carnivore to themselves to be pummelled to death by the lumpelope horde turning the tables on the poor animal. This partly exploits the fact that nearly all predators do not expect their quarry to run towards them instead of away when attacked, never mind all together, and will often be too bewildered to continue the attack. Only the most cunning and stealthy predators learn to dispatch an isolated individual without inciting the collective wrath of its compatriots. Against considerably larger and more threatening predators like crossjaws or brawlers, the hammerheads will rely on explosive sprints; due to their heavy builds, they can't sustain high speeds at distances that other lumpelopes can accomplish with ease, but against even heavier adversaries, it's usually enough. 

This strategy of reduced polygamy and reverting back into monogamy likely occurred due to trunkos being K-type breeders by default, only able to hold one egg in each pouch and the chicks being born small relative to the size of the adults. As the male now invests longer term interest with the female, they can have two eggs per season (a number of lumpelopes have also independently developed similar strategies to increase clutch sizes), while taking different mates per season increases genetic diversity. Unmated males may sometimes choose to brood the extra egg of a subordinate female of a different male with multiple mates in the hopes this show of parental skill will be remembered and increase his chances of successfully pairing the next season. Once hatched, the young hammerheads require relatively little parental guidance, and are gathered by the adults into creches nestled in the centre of the herd, where they will be more well-defended by the collective. Males tend to disperse to find new herds as they reach maturity to reduce inbreeding, while females remain with their natal herds. Male mortality rate spike at this stage in their lives, as a lone hammerhead has a much more difficult time fighting off a large predator; as a result, herd sex ratios naturally tend to skew around 3:2 or 2:1 females to males. One disadvantage of their massive headgear is poor peripheral vision, which they make up for by nestling themselves among herds of much larger herbivores, such as horned lumps and skybreakers, as a passive defence. The largely drab, golden brown plumage camouflages the animals while foraging spread apart or at rest in tall grassland and open woodland environments, and having dozens (or occasionally hundreds) of pairs of eyes watching at the same time certainly also helps. 

The tall grass of the stormveld, a biome patrolled by the world's largest flying predator, is not always a wise place to run around with elaborate display structures like antlers. If they're too big, then they would only give away your presence from above. Giraffowl are rare in this biome, for they are too conspicuous and further, excessive height is a hazard here: without any trees, the tallest standing animals are the objects lightning is most likely to strike. But there is one that is common here. The wattlehorn avoids both issues that keep its larger cousins from establishing on these windswept and stormy grasslands: it is a short and reclusive animal, much shorter in height than the tallest grasses, and its crests are deflatable, only rising to the occasion when it's safe, and then vanishing in a moment to avoid detection from prying eyes. It is a relative of the larger bladderbuck and the related bowerbuck of the inland forests. It falls into a genus all its own due to other differences - like wide-splayed hooves that support its weight on muddy ground - but shares the prominent, air-filled wattles that grow along the side of the face from the nostrils. Males of both the bladderbuck and the wattlehorn use their crests to court mates while avoiding being tangled up in vegetation or captured by predators.

Wattlehorns are behaviorally different from both their relatives, and neither form leks nor make bowers. They are a largely solitary giraffowl resembling a roe deer or a duiker in both size and habits. Shy, timid, and sticking near cover at all times, they run a wide maze of pathways pushed through the grass and are usually invisible from the sky as the foliage leans over their routes and provides a protective roof to hide them from their enemies and the worst of the rain. Males pursue females and try to impress them with a circling dance in which they inflate their crests and honk repetitively, but this same behavior also precedes a fierce fight when they meet other males. Females are littler, and though they might seem vulnerable to male aggression, they can slip away down narrower routes of escape to avoid males they are not interested in courting with. After successful coupling the female (who has no crests at all) gives birth most often to two pupa and broods them until her marsupium is quite obviously swollen, and like their relatives the chicks when at last they emerge are large and already completely flightless. Unlike those relatives, they stay close to their mothers and are cared for - albeit this is mainly limited to helping them avoid predators - for as long as four months. Mostly safe from aerial enemies, wattlehorns' day to day lives are not without dangers, as they are just the right size to fall victim to one specific predator that knows exactly where they hide, and is patiently waiting for the moment to strike...

The tall grass rainplains of the stormveld provide cover in which to hide, both for prey and their predators. This is a biome which wraps around the southern edge of the world, ringing over half of Serinaustra's coastline. It is a region that remains wild and uncharted, not yet dominated by the pack-hunting squabgoblins, and still populated by myriad stranger, little-seen hunters.

Descended from nightcreeper burdles have arisen the clutchclaws, a family of upright bipedal predators which use their raptorial forearms, hooked like those of mantises, to catch and kill their prey. As their talons grew larger and cumbersome to stand on, they switched to a two-legged stance, but did so vertically like a human, for they had no tail with which to balance, and no forward-set hips to counterbalance themselves forward, like primitive birds. This posture provided advantages in hiding, for they could now vanish from sight behind thin forest trees, or slip away unnoticed into tussocks of tall, upright grass. Using the slow burdle metabolism to its advantage, the creeping clutchclaw - tallest of all species at almost 5 feet - has specialized as a patient ambush predator, waiting for days between meals. It positions itself to the side of well-worn game trails where herds of herbivores like lumpelopes have passed by and flattened down the grass into tunnel-like paths, and hides between the grass stems, its mottled scales matching its surroundings (especially at night.) Its eyes are wide, and its pupils expand to fill them almost totally on dark nights; it misses not a single movement. The approach of a potential meal gets its full and total attention, as it moves ever so slowly, and silently, into position. It picks the weakest link in a group, especially the youngest ones which may trail just slightly behind the adults. It waits... it inches closer... and then, with an explosive pounce, it strikes. Its forearms are lined with sharp tooth-like spines which close around a target like two sets of deadly jaws, and a locking tendon in the wrist holds them closed and prevents any chance of escape. Off its runs into the grass with its prize, quick on its two feet, and able to disappear into the vast and mysterious veld before the victim's herd can follow. It does not feed only on larger herbivores; anything which moves and can be overpowered is on the menu, and it catches a wider range of prey than almost any other carnivore, ranging from small insects in the newly-hatched young of 10 inches tall, to trunkos weighing over 100 pounds in the largest adult females, almost as big as a man.

Totally solitary animals with no social tendencies, creeping clutchclaws are not above eating their own kind, and the young must be cautious to avoid the adults; they hatch from unattended nests made of heaps of decomposing grass, and scatter in all directions once born under cover of darkness. Males, about 8 inches shorter than adult females when mature, must also take great care when seeking to find a mate, or else that mate may instead find a meal. Unlike many species, a female will mate just once a year and will not do so again if she has already accepted a male. It is in her best interest after that to do away with any others who visit her, both to slay a competitor of her own young later, and to help nourish her so she can lay many eggs. Males thus balance on a knife's edge during courtship, staying out of the female's reach as long as they can while judging her intentions, and they rely highly on greater agility to avoid attacks. Only males have elongated plume-like scutes on their heads, which are connected to muscles in the skin and can be raised to indicate friendly intent, not one to fight - sort of the clutchclaw equivalent to a kind smile. But females mask their motivations very well, and ultimately a male can only make his best guess as to whether a seemingly accepting female is truly interested or simply luring him as ultimately the drive to procreate overpowers apprehension for his own safety. Females, as can be assumed, are quite long-lived and may live for 50 years or more. Males are less fortunate. Though nothing inherently about them suggests they'd have any less life expectancy, virtually every one will misjudge and eventually be hunted by a female. Most will mate just one or two times, the most reckless none at all, but the most skilled Casanovas of all might get over ten years of luck. The population as a whole is maintained mainly by a very small number of highly successful males which become the most competent at the dance of death with female partners, and which learn to watch out for subtle behavioral differences indicating a female is deceptive. 8 in 10 males die within their first three years of life, but these outliers compensate for the rest of the population, and may wander widely across the stormveld to visit many partners. Females likely prefer such skilled males over less experienced once, for their ability to avoid death year after year suggests they are strong and fit, and young produced from them will be better at survival than they would otherwise be.

The Grand Seawall

In the east of Serinaustra along the coast of the Unbroken Ocean, a large ridge of sky islands has formed. A large mountainous structure has been built over millions of years by the combined forces of countless cementrees, forming a terrestrial reef. This ant-made mountain range supports a canopy of cementrees on its summit, while the structure itself blocks the worst of the wind blowing from off shore, sheltering the landscape and allowing a small forest to grow in its shadow at the edge of the stormveld plains. 

The woodland scuttleburd is the largest species in its genus, a close relative of the tiny sanddiver of the dunes west of the great blue salt lake. Both species are members of a new, diverse radiation of small, armored burdles called dagadillos. Within this genus, they are the two extremes. While little sanddivers weigh just a few ounces, and hunt in loose sand dunes in a specialized, narrow range of habitat, woodland scuttlebirds grow to 12 pounds and are as big as house cats. They are very wide ranging and can be found across northern Serinaustra, favoring upland woodlands less prone to flooding, but where the soil is still damp and easily dug. They occur in the everdant forest, as well as in the small tract of woodland that grows in the shelter of the grand seawall in the east. They are the least fossorial scuttlebird, and use burrows only to lay eggs and sleep during the middle part of the day while finding all of their food outside them. They are active above-ground foragers, maintaining a familiar territory of up to 2 square miles, and there scurrying across the leaf litter and mossy substrate of the woodland from dusk to dawn, moving at a surprising pace. Their movement is quadrupedal, their hind legs tiny in relation to their arm claws, the tips of which they walk on, almost like crutches, with wide reaching strides. 

Their diet is generalized and broad; they take fallen seeds, fungi, fruit, any kind of insect, and small vertebrates like murds. Live prey up to their own weight can be caught between the two large claws and restrained below the beak, to be nibbled apart at leisure; there is no particular effort made to kill it, as long as it is unable to injure the hunter, but particularly large or troublesome animals which struggle too much may be bashed a few times against the ground to render them less problematic. Small prey and other food is collected slowly as it is found, while larger animals may be snatched by surprise with a sudden, unexpected burst of speed; once grabbed, there is little chance of escape, as the arm muscles clamp together like a vice around whatever they have captured. Its body armored head to toe with protective scutes, there is little any animal can do to dissuade this predator from making its kill, no matter how much it may bite back.

Woodland scuttlebirds are very effective diggers, and following their noses can locate hidden nests of small animals in the ground or within hollow logs, unearthing them with their claws and gobbling up egg or nestlings of any kind. They also feed on grubs and on roots in this way. Woodland scuttlebirds only make simple burrows, usually with a single entrance, as they have little fear of predators. Females may extend their tunnels deeper to create a more protected maternity chamber to lay and brood their single egg, however, up to 10 feet below ground. Though the woodland scuttlebird is not endothermic in the sense of most birds, it has the capacity to raise its core temperature several degrees by shivering, and does so to warm its egg up to ten degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding burrow. This decreases incubation time from several months in the sanddiver, which is too little to waste calories in this way, to just four to five weeks. The chick is cared for for up to a year, always staying close beside the parent - an extremely long time, for an animal so small. This is possible because the scuttlebird has few predators, and so can invest a great deal of time and energy in each offspring. Its lifespan too is long - with a slow metabolic rate, it can live for over 60 years.

The grand seawall provides a barrier to oceanic storms which roll in from the unbroken ocean, sheltering Serina's northeastern coast. This sky island ridge also provides excellent nest sites for many species of seabirds and tribbfishers which make their living out on that deep and turbulent sea. Their chicks are safe here from ground predators, and with nests often situated around the back of the ridge, they are kept out of the wind and rain too. But there is no refuge entirely lacking in danger, especially to the very youngest animals. 

Mosscloaks lurk on the cliffs of this sky island, sickle-billed skuorcs with bodies stretched like snakes, but which cling to the steep slopes with large and sharp claws. Named for a crest of matted, almost scute-like plumage which lays over their backs and resembles moss on their otherwise scaly, stone-like skin, these descendants of scrabbleskuas can hide in plain sight. They are slow-moving but very patient predators, able to wait days and even weeks between meals. During the day they sit motionless, suspended with their heads downward, clung to the rock with a prehensile tail and sturdy hind claws; their back feet can rotate virtually backwards, and stay that way for hours. Occasionally one will lunge suddenly, and with luck, it may come away with a bird snagged in its front claws which fold almost mantis-like in wait of such a chance. In this way, the mosscloak could be considered analogous to the cliff strikeworm of more northern sky islands. But this is not its primary way to catch food.

Mosscloaks are active predators, albeit slow and shy ones. They aren't very brave, and nests attended by parents are safe - a few swift pecks are enough to send one turning the other way and slinking to safety. But there are always stragglers in a big group. Sometimes a parent is late returning from a fishing trip. Sometimes, the parent will not return at all. When night falls, the moss cloaks slink up the cliffs and scout out the vulnerable and the unattended. Silently sidling up to their targets, they steal the hapless and the helpless and steal away into the dark. Smaller prey is swallowed alive, struggling feebly as it goes down. Larger chicks must be dismantled to fit down the mosscloak's gullet, and so its large arm claws are used to tear apart its meal before consumption. Though usually solitary animals, mosscloaks sometimes seem to hunt in packs, several animals surrounding a single prey item and closing in around it to prevent its escape. This is more than likely coincidental rather than coordinated, as only one hunter usually succeeds in actually catching the prey and runs off with it, leaving the rest behind with their efforts unrewarded. It is possible, however, that this sort of hunting still provides greater odds of success than hunting alone, especially at times where the seabird chicks are mostly of an older and less vulnerable age. Mosscloaks themselves produce far fewer young than most skuorcs, and after a long 10 month pregnancy, a female will bear just one or two young each up to half her body length. The large size of the babies gives them a head start at survival and means they can hunt the chicks the adults also feed on immediately, as well as being much less vulnerable to predators of their own.

By the late hothouse the skuwyrms, legless serpentine skuorc birds, have achieved a worldwide distribution on account of their ability to endure long periods of time without feeding making them successful rafters overseas. Skurwyrms now range in size from a few inches in length to more than thirty feet, and have colonized trees, grasslands, freshwater, and cave ecosystems. There are no truly marine skuwyrms, and in that environment alone they may face too much competition from superficially similar but wildly unrelated eelsnakes. Nearly anywhere else upon Serina, however, you can find some sort of skuwyrm.

The rare sky islands of Serinaustra are widely known for their very different fauna than their more populace northern counterparts, and this extends to smaller creatures as much as the larger. Verminfan strikeworms are absent from Serinaustra, probably because the male, though able to fly, is very poor at it, and so does not frequently survive sea crossings, even accidental ones in storms. Combined with the relative scarcity of this biome in the southern hemisphere, a rare lucky traveler is still very unlikely to find a suitable place to deposit the eggs it may be carrying from a female, and so establish a viable population. So here, the same sort of niche is filled exclusively by skuwyrms, some of which have begun to develop interesting and unique adaptations to facilitate their survival.

The scuttling skython is a species of skuwyrm common to the southern sky islands that is an active predator of cliff-nesting birds and of small murds. A descendant of the rat snakes, and a sister group to the Serinarctan trithons, it shares with the former an active predatory habit and a preference to chase down prey by sight rather than wait for it to come close enough to ambush. With the latter it has in common the remarkable trait of specialized mobile ribs which partially protrude from its ventral surface, providing traction when climbing steep surfaces. An early trithon ancestor reached Serinaustra around four million years ago, riding rafts of vegetation washed out to sea from northern coastal forests, and it is from this animal that the skython evolved. Though both groups share walking ribs, their expression differs in both lineages: trithons have closely-set ribs only near the front half of their bodies, which are tipped with a sort of claw by which they can cling to trees or rocks, while skythons have wider-spaced ribs which extend most of the way down their body and lack a claw, providing grip by squeezing against rocks like fingers. While trithons have become sit-and-wait predators with a jaw more adapted to hold onto large prey, which they swallow whole, skythons chase after animals that they can easily overpower. Their beak is designed to tear and rend their food, and they eat it in small bites while getting leverage to slice pieces off the carcass by holding it down with the ribs lower down their body. While trithons are mostly featherless as adults, skythons retain insulating plumage over their faces and dorsal surfaces which insulate them against faster temperature changes at the higher elevations in which they live.

While they originated in Serinaustra, from a northern ancestor, skythons are not restricted to this continent, but can as well be found along the firmament, and very sporadically across the great barrier ridge of Serinarcta, where they seem to face strong competition from strikeworms and to never be very abundant. Rafting northwards is a rarer event, as it generally requires going against prevailing wind currents, though it has occurred such as with northern burdles. For skythons, a possible alternative route may have involved these animals being carried incidentally by large flying birds. Both methods of dispersal have been utilized by different animal species to reach widely separated environments throughout Serina's history. 

The drifting dawnrider is a species of ptoose very closely related to the autumnal airwalker, but found a world away in easternmost Serinaustra. Like that relative, its ancestral long migrations have been trimmed down to local flights between adjacent biomes, but in few places are the differences more dramatic. These seraphs nest and roost on the high pinnacles of the grand seawall, Serinaustra's tallest sky island, which extends along the east coast of the continent as a vast coast-hugging reef towering thousands of feet above sea level. But they don't feed there. Taking flight from the height of the great seawall in the mornings, they ride the strong ocean breezes down the landward side of the ridge in their elegant flocks and gather over the stormveld, a wide-reaching grassland to the south of the seawall, comprised of endless miles of tall grass tussocks blowing in the wind. They feed in the air, but use little energy to stay aloft, riding the air currents with their wings outstretched to catch every gust as they snap up flying insects from the meadow below and crane their necks down to clip the nutritious seed heads of the grasses. For several hours they careen and cavort, wheeling about in the air just above the plain, nimbly dodging larger grazers and sneaking predators.

But as the day progresses, the winds strengthen; the sun heats the land faster than the sea, creating low pressure systems as those sea breezes grow in strength and rush inland. When it grows difficult to maintain their hovering flight over the grass, the flocks converge and circle upwards until they leave the plain far below them, and once higher than the seawall, they slowly meander in lines and rows back to their roosts, their flocks from afar resembling so many huge sky snakes undulating in the air and coming to rest one by one on the top of the ridge. By afternoon all have returned safely to the heights to rest, preen, and feed the young they left behind, and now it is most often that the winds come to a head and storms form over the sea, soon surging onto the veld. The seawall is tall enough to redirect low clouds such as those which rise up from its surface, and fierce, rotating thunderstorms soon slide around its eastern edge before billowing out over the coastal grassland and dumping torrents of rain. The stormveld is a rain plain, a habitat which is dominated by grasses not because of a lack of water, nor from the influence of animal browsers, but because the winds in this region are so intense as to greatly limit the ability of woody plants to reach any significant height. Scattered here and there on higher points, what few trees can survive here grow lop-sided and with dramatic westward leans, their eastern sides often stripped clean of all leaves. The wind shapes them into contorted, fallen-over sculptures, and true forests cannot grow here. But the tall grasses can; flexible stems bend and sway, but never break. They bounce back to shape when the storms end, something the trees cannot do. And their resilience to the weather lets them dominate this region, rising to their full height in between severe weather and in doing so shading the seedlings of trees and crowding them out.

 The stormveld is a new biome which did not exist before the late hothouse, but it has in fact arisen from an older habitat type. Rainplains are a modified form of soglands, which have managed to persist in spite of the proliferation of trees in other parts of the late hothouse landscape thanks to the specific environmental conditions which only occur in a select few regions such as these wind-swept coasts. The combination of wind-battered stormveld and towering, sheltering seawall come together to provide a niche in the world for the dawnrider, which has found a place on the edge of two biomes wherever no matter where it finds itself, all it needs is sure to be only a short flight away.

Crested kitewings are one of the stormveld's most abundant large flying birds. Standing five feet high, these descendants of eleganders are very powerful fliers but to feed must descend to earth; there, they forage for seeds, insects, tender grass shoots across the plains, walking on four wings but often standing to peer over the grass on their hind legs alone. A single long bobbing head feather on each one's crown pops up and down through the grass like a flag, so flocks can keep in contact in grass that grows taller than their eyes. They are skittish and wary birds, threatened by many smaller ground predators as they land to eat, and easily startled into flight. Very large numbers provide some protection, and a total population of around 10 million birds travels almost always as a single super-flock that takes many hours to pass overhead and moves in an endless passage counter clockwise around the continent of Serinaustra. They land to feed in extraordinary abundance, descending from the sky in vast, winding lines in the air up to 250 miles long. Their strategy for survival is simple; landing together in their millions, they not only discourage predators through the sheer over-stimulation that so many individuals creates as far as sight and sound, but overwhelm the hunger of all carnivores around at all times so that on a population-wide level predation does not affect their numbers to any significance.

Flocks spend a few days in one location, eating everything which can be eaten and leaving the veld trampled and mowed down in wide lines several hundred miles across. In a permanently wet landscape virtually devoid of widespread burning, the crested kitewing has evolved as a living equivalent to wildfire. Seeming to decimate the land everywhere they alight and render lush green plains to scorched, barren earth, they in fact refresh and revitalize the stormveld. Just weeks after the flocks have moved on, new seeds sprout - including species of flower that can only get their chance to grow when the grass is totally cleared away for a short time. The stripped land explodes into flower in as little as 20 days, a fleeting show which will be gone within 6 weeks. Then, the grasses grow new stalks. A huge quantity of dung left behind fertilizes an extraordinary flush of new vitality even after the flowers set seed and wither in the grass's shade, and for several months the grass in the land left behind will continue to grow exceptionally lush.

Crested kitewings are timid on land but in their element once off the ground; they can rise quickly beyond even the reach of storms, joining the skystalker in a celestial domain far above the clouds. Now in their element, they are bold. Fast and nimble, they ride thermals and the updrafts of great weather systems and turn and careen too swiftly in the sky for even that apex predator to catch up to them. A pair of especially long wing feathers near the rump are controlled by especially large follicle muscles, so that when on the ground they fold opposite to the rest of the wing plumage and disappear underneath the closed wings. In flight, once at height, they unfurl and trail behind the bird in flight like two trailing streamers. For a few weeks each year during the breeding period, the feathers of the males fall out and are replaced by even longer, rounded kite-like plumes that trail on a quill up to 4 feet long, and males display them to attract mates. They do this by competing with rival males in aerial dogfights in which the winner may pull his rival's display feathers as a show of his greater fitness to convince a female to select him as her suitor; mating occurs in the air, unusually for archangel birds. Odder still is the method of rearing young; kitewings are true nomads, unable to settle in one place for any length of time, and they have had to find novel solutions to the brooding process for their pupal young.

 The females are nest parasites, and will invade the flocks of other colony-nesting seraphs through aggressive force, chasing mothers away and quickly depositing one or two pupal 'eggs' in a single nest among those already there. In the chaos, mothers are concerned more about returning to their own nests to protect their young than in counting their 'eggs', and many individuals will not reject the odd-egg-out, even if it looks quite different, because this method of child-care is so extremely uncommon among archangels none has yet evolved a need to avoid it. The kitewings fly off on their circuit, never to know their own young, and they are raised by their unwitting fosters. The drifting dawnrider is a common host species and a coveted one, because it feeds its young after hatching and thus improves their survival odds, but this is not necessary. Super-precocial, insect-catching kitewing chicks can still take care of themselves if born from nests of mothers that abandon them at birth. The choice of foster parents is very diverse, however, and includes over 25 species of archangels, including such unlikely and distantly related species as the skystalker itself, if its nest is ever for a moment left unattended. If this occurs, then even this giant, apex predator will mother the tiny animal that may normally be viewed as a meal.

The skystalker will usually brood the tiny intruder egg among its own; it can surely tell something is different, for it is much smaller, and yet it still tends it, for its maternal instinct is very strong, and the chick is small enough that it does not reduce the survival chances of their own young. The chick which results hatches ahead of their own chicks, growing and gaining a size advantage so that once they are born several weeks later it can compete with them for food. Remarkably, even when all young are born and the parent can see that one is dramatically unlike the others, they still do not abandon it. Though genuine altruistic behavior is not outside the question for adoptive parents which by now have grown attached to the little intruder, one or two interlopers in a nest actually improve the survival odds for the skystalker's own chicks because they mean the skystalker chicks are statistically less likely to be eaten by predators with several smaller and more vulnerable decoys in the nest. Even so, predation on their nests is uncommon, and most of the adopted kitewings survive to independence - more than from any other host species - and often they grow larger than those without the large portions of energy-rich food - mostly meat - that their hosts provide them. But there is one major reason that the skystalker is not the go-to host parent that all kitewings choose to use, and it is not simply because skystalkers are comparatively rare. No kitewing adopted by a skystalker will ever successfully reproduce: they are all dead ends, accidents. Kitewings do not normally imprint on their typical host species, instinctively departing whenever the food runs out and joining others of their own kind, whose calls they recognize innately for the first four months or so of their lives. For most hosts, they are left on their own in just a few weeks, a month at most, and then seek out their fellows, learning normal socialization. But skystalkers will feed adopted kitewings as long as their own chicks - for years, long past their window to learn to be kitewings and find their own kind. They're not dumb; if the gravy is still flowing, they are happy to stay around for the free food. But in doing so, their development is halted. They pass the point of no return: with no tough love - an end of their free meals - they stay much too long. They learn to be skystalkers, not kitewings. They imprint on the wrong species, and worse, a species which can in other circumstances kill and eat them.

They may stay with their foster parents for around two years, and until then they do quite well. But puberty will come one day, and then adulthood tells them to wander and find unrelated mates. The most fortunate may, by luck, attach themselves to a more tolerant individual skystalker of a variety which doesn't like the taste of birds. It may then become a sort of skystalker pet, though it's an imbalanced relationship, for it seeks a partner, not a friend, and will never be quite satisfied as its "mate" will never reciprocate its courting behavior. But other times, it is simply killed by an unfamiliar skystalker confused by its boldness and disturbed by its attention - it may or may not be eaten. In either case, it never reproduces. Skystalkers are not viable hosts, for though they keep kitewings alive, the kitewings never join the breeding population and so their genetic line will die out with them. As such, they are never a first choice for mothers looking for a parent for their offspring. Yet there are so many kitewings, and every one in need of a nest during the breeding season, that inevitably some always make a mistake. It's not common enough to affect the population, so it continues at low levels. And so every year, a few skystalkers will find themselves trailed, always bewildered, by an oddly confident and highly confused kitewing that was the end result of this unfortunate mix-up. 

While many other pteese may nest on the great seawall that separates the eastern stormveld from the deep depths of the unbroken ocean, there is a species which never strays far from these sheer cliffs. A descendant of the gluoose, it belongs to a new late hothouse genus of ptoose which has abandoned tending to its nests altogether. Banded barnacle pteese, one of some six related species, lay their pupal "eggs", the cocoons of their developing chicks, directly on the cliffs on which they live. To disguise them from predators, these pteese have repurposed the defensive latex secretion their ancestors used to repel predators to mask both the sight and the scent of their offspring before they emerge. Mother barnacle pteese carefully adhere each of their pupa with their latex secretions to the surface of the cliff as they give birth to as many as nine at one time. After gluing her "eggs" in clusters of two to five in a few places around the cliff, she covers them with a thinner layer of latex everywhere except one small spot at the top of the sac, which she leaves open as an air hole; it is this pocket that the young will instinctively peck through when they are ready to hatch, squeezing through the rubbery covering. The latex takes around an hour to cure, and so the mother doesn't immediately leave. Rather, as soon as the last pupa is deposited, she goes around and covers each one with a camouflaging layer of grit, sand, soil, and scraps of moss or grass. This hides them from visual hunters, making them resemble nothing more than lumpy outcrops of the cementree cliff itself. The latex almost totally masks the smell of the chick inside too, so that even keen creatures that hunt by scent will pass them right by. Once certain her young will be safe, the mother ptoose will depart and leave her young to their own devices. The pupa are incubated only by the ambient temperatures, and are usually positioned to recieve only early morning sun for a boost of warmth but not so much that they will cook. They take longer to develop than in most pteese as a result, hatching out in about seven weeks independent and fully able to care for themselves. In emerging fully formed from "barnacles" stuck to rocks and flying away to begin their own lives somewhere else on the great seawall, these birds harken back to a certain myth.

Barnacle pteese are all specialized to live on sky islands and to feed primarily on mosses and lichens, plants that are not usually favored by any birds as a primary diet. They cling to steep cliffs and perch on narrow ledges, propped upright by stiff rod-like tail feathers, and reaching low-growing clumps of vegetation that they can scrape from the rock with their bills. Though they are long-winged, they are not energetic as a result of their low-calorie diet. They move rather lazily, and when they must take flight they rely on updrafts from the land and sea around the seawall to soar rather than to flap under their own power for more than a few minutes. Not highly social, a few individuals will often be seen near each other as they coincidentally share the same food source, and they do not usually mind this company as the seawall provides enough for all. Both young and adult feed on the same diet and behave similarly to one another, though the younger birds - like most pteese - are stronger fliers. Adult barnacle pteese are notable for having bright, mostly white plumage with colorful red or orange highlights, in this species on their wingtips. This means they are very visible to predators as they forage on the cliffs, something unusual for a slow-moving grazer. But adult barnacle pteese retain their defensive latex secretions, too, and if threatened will use them to gum up the feathers of a predator, sending it plummeting from the air down the cliff to the ground or the raging sea far below. Yet while the grown barnacle ptoose has few predators, the young cannot produce a large quantity of latex until they are larger and the symbiotic yeast that produce it can proliferate in their guts. Until around a year of age, the vulnerable young barnacle ptoose is a drab and easily missed creature colored in mottled grey and brown hues, and which flies almost exclusively at night.

Such large flocks of pteese always on the move across the stormveld inevitably draw unwanted attention, and this is where the spitzer makes its home. An inveterate aerial hunter of other birds, this smallest member of the boltbill genus is a close relative of the basin boltbill of the north polar region. It is a small bird, with a wingspan around 28 inches, and it uses its size to its advantage to outmaneuver its prey in the sky. It hunts singly, unlike most boltbills, for its choice of target is too little to share with a pack: it mainly hunts the young pteese, which are faster than the adults but also more delicate, and easy to mortally wound with its rapier-like beak. Spitzers are active by day, following flocks along their margins as a constant surveillance, and remaining always overhead even as they land to feed on the ground. Adults of all but the tiniest pteese have nothing to fear from it; it will not risk breaking its comparatively thin beak by striking a target larger than itself. But it keeps the juveniles constantly on edge, trying to hide within the middle of the flock.

To keep them moving, it periodically darts swiftly through the group and chatters almost mockingly with a laughing shriek. Its dives and cackles serve to instill fear in its targets, because this tests their fitness and will expose the most vulnerable; those which are confident in their abilities to fly strongly will not react as fearfully to a potential threat. Any youngster which is just a little unwell, a bit weaker, or slightly less wary than its fellows inevitably falls behind as they wheel around in close defensive formation, and the spitzer picks them off from the edges of the wider group. It dives from a height, reaching upwards of 100 miles per hour, and then deftly skewers them through the lower neck, a vulnerable region with few large bones to potentially get caught on its bill. With prey giving its last few futile flutters as it lay dying on the sword of its slayer, the spitzer will now toss it upwards and catch it again in the abdomen. Its radula-like tongue, lined with cutting keratin blades, will scrape out all the soft tissue of the carcass while in flight, leaving behind only a rain of feather and small bones when it is finished. Male spitzers, which are recognizable for their long trailing eyebrow plumes, will also present such pre-made kills to females to trade for opportunities to mate. Females lay their eggs in the dirty detritus that lies beneath ptoose nesting colonies on sky islands; the larvae are free-living scavengers which feed first on waste, but soon gorge by night on any dead or sickly chicks and chew into unattended pupa. They take around 2 months to pupate, and another year from then to reach full adulthood.

Living very different from the little spitzer, the umbracuda is the largest flying skewer and can reach a wingspan of 11 feet. This borderline crepuscular-nocturnal species is not a boltbill, but diverged earlier from the white-tipped skydart, and as such it has several attributes not seen in boltbills including two small hind limb claws that are still used to aid in clasping a mate in flight. It is too big to skewer prey comparable to its own size; the bones of its beak are less resilient than those of a much smaller skewer and could not withstand the force if it, too, hunted by high-speed impact. Instead, its beak is strong serrated on both left and right sides, and it disables prey by lacerating. Rather than stab a target head-on, the umbracuda is a master of the glancing blow, flying just next to a victim so as to run the saw-like edges of its beak against its flesh like a knife through steak. Its targets are much larger than those of the spitzer, and it hunts adults of larger seraphs, those which are slower fliers than the little dawnriders and juveniles of all species. It travels in packs of two to four, often on the edges of the immense kitewing flocks as they are at their densest just before and after they leave their roosts at dusk and dawn, and is their only aerial predator when adult. But their numbers are so vast that healthy adults have nothing to fear from this hunter, which eats it fill only on the weak and injured among them, keeping their groups fit and strong by culling the sick. Though they eat them, they ultimately benefit the kitewings as a whole by catching any unhealthy individuals so quick that they all but totally stop any contagions from spreading, which would otherwise pose risk of widespread epidemics due to how closely all the kitewings live with one another. Like the spitzer, the umbracuda periodically performs mock-attacks on the flocks of its prey to force them into tighter formation and to reveal the weaker members of the group to be picked off. Umbracudas often share a single kill on the wing, with one holding it for another flying below to feed from, and the members of a pack will toss it between them for each to feed until the carcass is emptied and the husk is tossed down to the plains far below.

Umbracudas will also hunt even bigger prey, coordinating attacks on solitary birds including hellicans as well as on the largest seademon tribbfishers. They are the only potential predator of the young skystalker in the air and occasionally kill them too, being too fast for the adults to catch. Yet there is a way to keep these roving bands of knife-weilding marauders from targeting your chick, if you can pay it. Umbracudas are much less common than other skewers because they require very large amounts of meat in which to lay eggs and to feed their larvae for the long 5 months it takes them to pupate. Very few carcasses can be expected to remain for so long uneaten by other scavengers, and Serinaustra has fewer large land animals than Serinarcta. Left to themselves, packs of umbracudas must cooperatively collect prey to feed the young of the dominant breeding pair, which deposit carcasses on a sky island ledge along the great seawall, and there lay their eggs within. They cannot reproduce successfully without at least three adults, for they must both hunt for food and defend these carcasses they've brought back to their young from rival predators at all times, dive bombing any other bird that comes close to this "nursery" high above the stormveld below. But their agility to defend against smaller and more nimble predators is not ideal, and often villaingulls manage to pilfer their nursery, eating not just the carrion but also the larval umbracudas that burrow within it. Skystalkers, if they want to make sure their own young will not be targeted, can assist the umbracuda in keeping its young safe and fed by generously sharing a larger carcass than the skewers themselves could ever catch or carry, and by keeping it near to their own nests so that no other nest-raiders will be bold enough to feed from it. Skystalkers that will leave out a sacrificial carcass, and which will tolerate umbracudas usurping it and breeding in their close proximity will receive privilege; the pack will not harm their own chicks when they fledge, and further, will defend the nesting territory against rival umbracuda packs that would kill them. This unusual working relationship is strictly business, not friendly; skystalkers and umbracudas do not interact socially, and are too different to directly communicate. But the umbracuda, while manipulative, is not deceptive. It will honor the unspoken agreement when the skystalker provides a token in exchange for its safety. The dominant pair will give their chicks a pass, and keep the other members of their packs at bay, and this truce will extend until they are grown. The next time they nest, though, it will be expected that they pay the fee again.

Split River

On the opposite side of Serinaustra in the west, Split River cuts across the stormveld. This is a river that bifurcates into two depending on rainfall. When the primary drainage is filled up at its central lake, that lake drains in opposing directions, causing temporary flooding events that make the plains in this region the wettest in the stormveld, much resembling the soglands of the early hothouse. One stream of the river then goes to the ocean, while the other opens up to the primarily land-locked Auroral Sea, a freshwater basin. 

The fluddle is the largest species of rivercarver, and it only occurs along the west fork of Split River, reaching a length of up to five feet and a weight of 250 lbs, though only males grow so big. Like others of its genus, this species is a keystone species in the ecosystem it dwells, for its instinctive drive to carve calm pools of water from the banks of flowing waterways to cultivate food and raise its young provides increased habitat for many other animal species as well. Fluddles in particular are important to the split river basin, for their draining of the river during its highest flood periods into many ponds serves to store water during times when the west fork of the river no longer recieves runoff from the Auroral Sea. When the river flows strongly the larger male fluddles dig out channels away from it which fill with water, forming pools which support the growth of the crustaceans the fluddle eats, and which attract females to nest. The males are very territorial, each one defending one such nursery pond that may be expanded over several years to over up to an acre across, and they protect a harem of females and many offspring from predators as well as rival males which will occasionally charge into a pond and try to claim it for their own. Such fights begin with display as each challenger erects a dewlap beneath its neck and flushes blood to the soft tissues of the face, transforming it from a golden hue to bright reddish pink. If this is not enough, they will fight physically, occasionally to the death of one from bludgeoning bites with their powerful crushing beaks and blows from their flippers, lined with sharp scales and as sturdy as shovels.

During dry seasons where the Auroral Sea is not overfilled, and thus the west fork of Split River no longer flows, it would historically dry up for up to a year at a time, becoming a tall grass rain plain like the surrounding landscape where water does not pool. But now, the fluddle's nursery pools hold water year-round. The region transforms into a series of shallow, stagnant pools as the fluddles' breeding ponds slowly drain into the riverbed, connecting their territories with a permanent waterway along which the small females, still just around 50 lbs, will travel as they choose a nesting ground. Their ponds will continue to collect daily rain, and as they now overflow they produce a steady trickle of water into the river that keeps it slowly flowing even without its main source of water. The tall grasses of the stormveld are descended from sogland flora, but evolved to live without permanently soggy roots, so they don't thrive here any longer. Instead the split river basin has been turned into an ancestral sogland, where short grasses grow from a saturated water table; it is the largest such sogland ecosystem ever to exist on Serinaustra, appearing millions of years after most of the similar ones that once covered Serinarcta have receded away to small remnant pockets.

By keeping the riverbed of Split River permanently filled with water year-round, the fluddle has contributed to the isolation of the northern tract of stormveld becoming separated from the rest of the biome south of the river, increasing biodiversity as species that once crossed when the water disappeared now remain apart and diverge from one another. It is even indirectly responsible for the evolution of the baba clawga in this way, preventing its ancestors from readily crossing the river basin to intermix with other clutchclaws. This is not because they can't swim, but because they avoid the shorter grass characteristic of the constantly flooded landscapes, as they cannot avoid predators or catch prey without the cover of the high stormveld vegetation. Many species of water birds including large flocks of pteese that would not normally gather either along a flowing river nor on the stormveld itself now utilize the fluddle's personal sogland for nesting. The calm, shallow water is nutrient-rich because the fluddle's digging fills the river with sediment from the land, and it supports huge numbers of fish and invertebrates. This makes it an ideal place to feed, and a relatively safe place to raise their young where predators cannot easily sneak up on them in the short grass. The fluddle has turned Split River into one of the most important migration stop-overs in the world, and the most productive region of the entire stormveld.

The skyrider is a large ptoose, tall enough to look you eye to eye, found across Serina in the late hothouse in wetland habitats. These descendants of the summer skycutter are still migratory, their travels each year taking them on a loop north to the polar basin for its sunlit season where they nest, and south to the split river basin for the austral summer, so that they see only a few weeks of night in a year, and only on their route from one pole to the next. In between, they may stop over at any suitably wet location where the grass grows short enough to spot predators over, with particularly important stop-overs including the slade, the diluvian divide, and the salt marshes along cradle bay. It is at their "wintering" ground along the west fork of Split River where the skyrider can be seen at its most impressive however, for after nesting so far north months earlier, the entire population including all of their juveniles will travel to Serinaustra and stay for several months until the polar spring. During seasons where the river flows quickly, not all of them settle here; some will instead disperse across the margins of the stormveld's lakes in scattered flocks of a few dozen to perhaps 2,000 birds. But in seasons where the river slows and grows shallow, filled only by the slow trickle of the fluddle's ponds, more will gather in one relatively small site than at any other time of year. Around three million skyriders will aggregate there for a little over four months to feed in the waters at such times, nearly the entire population. They spend their winter wading and stirring up small fish, shrimp and insects with their narrow pointed beaks, as well as feeding on seeds, tubers and algae. Their voices fill the air and drown out most other sound as they periodically take to the air and fly short distances up and down the river basin. Their stridulant calls are somewhere between melodic and obnoxious, chiming like castanets and wind instruments together and produced with two very different tones at once. The longer the crescendo carries on, hour after hour, the less pleasant it may begin to sound.

Differing from their ancestors, skyriders now bring their young with them on the trip south, and will lead them back north the following season before departing as the adults will begin to nest again. As is happening with several lineages of pteese, the hothouse's highly productive ecosystems have allowed the niche partitioning between young and adult skyrider to slowly fade away. Now all ages of skyriders feed on roughly the same range of food, and the young can stay with the adults for protection from increasingly dangerous aerial predators like boltbills, which become a strong selective pressure for families to stay closer together for longer, and for adult pteese to increase in size so as to become too big to hunt. Some trace differences in behavior do still persist between young and old, however; as the littler yearlings are lighter and longer-winged than grown adults, they can feed in additional ways. While adults can only feed by wading, young can wade, swim, and skim food from near the surface while in flight, using relatively larger pecten that line their beaks to strain algae and zooplankton. As they grow this ability diminishes, and they will peck all of their food in larger bites.

Lastly, it is not only the skyrider's own young that it carries each year from north to south. Another traveler has been introduced to Serinaustra on the wings of their vast flocks: the seaskipper sniffler. A species which has habitually ridden for short distances on migratory birds to escape the northern polar winter at the end of the verdant summer season, only around 50,000 years ago did a population of these birds establish permanently on Serinaustra after enduring a flight of several thousand miles, including a last passage over the ocean. The seaskipper, after so long, must now be considered native to Split River, and from here it has spread further along northern Serinarcta as far east as the severed sea. But its introduction, though natural, has resulted in ecological changes as the species here reaches higher population density than in its original northern range. Sheltered within fluddle ponds, and subject to much lower predation here than on the polar basin, the southern population has become bolder and more aggressive; they may now exclude other, less pushy small water birds from establishing themselves in areas they once did, and though they still cling to larger birds of various species in order to disperse short distances, they have stopped migrating regularly. They have become constantly present, opportunistic nest predators at an uncommonly high population density, directly affecting other competing species' populations. There is beginning to appear a divide among the newly introduced seaskippers here, however, with one group becoming particularly skilled at sticking with the skyrider flock and less inclined to stray. This population continues to move across continents, but never leaves the vicinity of skyriders; if it fears being left behind, it will now go so far as to crudely imitate the distressed call of their own young to get their attention long enough to climb aboard. It has become a sort of commensal to them, having learned that the skyrider is docile and can provide protection from larger predators to any small bird that sticks close by, not just their own young, and likewise benefitting from catching the small insects and fish that will be disturbed by the feeding of the flocks. Now rarely interbreeding with either the larger polar basin population or the sedentary split river one, which in turn do not meet one another, this is a species now on the verge of splitting up down three very different paths. 

The grand sleeper is the endemic swampstalker of split river, a species characterized by its long periods of torpor between favorable high water periods. An adult grand sleeper can remain burrowed into the mud up to 6 feet undergrond for as long as 18 months without feeding, and its metabolism is very slow. Though they can occasionally appear at any time, only when the river rises and the surrounding soglands flood do the largest sleepers awaken to feed in large numbers. But while their juveniles are active most of the year and chase down anything they can catch in their narrow, tooth-like bills, the mature animal is sedentary even when it rises to feed. As this species matures the cusps on its lower mandible don't continue to grow with its size, but those on the top bill do, growing long and forming a robust comb-like structure. Adult grand sleepers feed by suction, slowly ambling underwater and lying in wait for passing schools of fish to come near, and then opening their mouth and expansive throat pouches in a sudden jolt that forms a low pressure pocket in their jaws, pulling water and everything in it down their gullets. The water is then ejected through the "teeth" in the upper jaw, and the food sufficiently strained out is swallowed. Despite its great size, the grand sleeper is harmless to larger animals, and indeed its slow movement makes it very reclusive and avoidant of conflict.

This swampstalker is one of the most aquatic and only moves overland by necessity and with rarity, but it is adapted to walk on the bottom sediment and not to swim for long periods, so that it still retains forearm claws and its tail is not highly flattened into a paddle-like shape. Only during the mating season that comes after the largest floods do grand sleepers spend significant time on land, for then the males gather on remaining higher banks to lek, displaying against each other in a group for females to peruse from the water nearby. Normally a subdued, speckled mixture of tan and dull green hues, males take on brighter patches of blue and violet coloration when courting females, which are most vibrant on their throat pouches. As they fill them with air, they expand as unmistakable signals of their intent, and a rhythmic pulsing of the pouch as it is inflated and then the air is expelled is accompanied by deep booming vocalizations. Males high-walk to put on a more imposing display, though this is very tiring, and they must drop back down to their bellies after several minutes to rest. Most females strongly prefer the largest males with the loudest voices, and a few individual males will sire most young born in any given season as a result. Yet females, too, compete for mating rights, with the largest of them often being able to exclude smaller ones from entering the lek at all. As a result, the smaller males may take the chance to return to the water and mate with these less dominant mates; unlike the largest males, they usually have only a single breeding partner. This secondary system of mating makes up around 10% of successful copulation, and may represent the beginning of two distinct morphs of male evolving, one which is stronger and attracts potential mates to him, and one which is smaller and actively searches for female company.

The valentine squibis is a strongly social, herbivorous scrounger most common along the split river basin, especially north of the west fork. Unlike many animals discussed here, this species is found well north of this area too, extending up into the upland grasslands that lie west of the saltspray sandhills, a region known as the hidden glade. Yet it is absent from the stormveld more than a hundred miles south of the river, on account of its requirement for low vegetation that it can see over, as it relies on a wide view of its surroundings to avoid predators and to communicate with conspecifics. Named partly for its prominently featherless, heart-shaped forehead pad, valentine squibis flush blood into their faces to turn it from a pale grey-pink to a stunning red when excited, and this feature is larger in the male, serving a role in courtship. The other inspiration for its name comes from its behavior; the valentine squibis is strongly social and physically affectionate. Pairs do not really form, and both sexes may mate with multiple partners, but even unrelated flock members maintain social bonds through frequent preening. They are especially good at picking each other's feathers clean of nits and dirt, as the structure of each tentacle on their face is evolved to resemble a comb. Of course, this gregarious preening, though sweet to see and important for flock cohesion, is not its primary purpose.

This scrounger is an oddity for its diet of mostly vegetation, as this is very uncommon among natatory scroungers which arose as fish-eating predators. It's also unique for how it feeds. Rather than clipping plants with the beak, it combs with its tentacle hooks through the stems of narrow-leafed plants to strip the leaves, buds, seeds and flowers off, and then transport them into the mouth. A specialist grazer of forbs, herbs, tree seedlings and flowers, the valentine squibis does not eat grass foliage, instead selectively feeding on other vegetation growing across short grass habitats like the split river soglands. It does feed on grass seeds in significant amount, though, straining them through its tentacles and harvesting the grain from panicles before it falls to the ground.

The valentine squibis is a nomadic animal, living in flocks rarely smaller than 50, but rarely more than 200. They need to wander widely to find the scattered, select plants they favor in their diet, which may limit the size of their groups compared to animals which eat the grass wholesale, a less limited resource. This animal relies on group coordination to spot and avoid predators, with all adults helping keep the more vulnerable young within the flock. They bunch together when pursued with very young chicks, as the chicks cannot run at full speed until around a month of age, and will attack predators head-on at this time. Kicking with the strong legs - powerfully built to run at speed - is the first line of defense, but this will progress to striking and biting if they are cornered, and then to gnawing at them with their beaks and holding on with their tentacles. Once chicks are older, however, this scrounger will switch to a splitting up tactic when chased where every member of the group takes on in its own direction and dodges and weaves quickly, leaping over water and uneven terrain and turning suddenly, trying to shake off an attacker and fast enough to succeed most of the time. By dividing up in this way, it's every individual for itself, but it means that at most a hunter can catch just one of them, and the rest will be safe. After a hunt is over, a group slowly reconnect with every member calling out to each other with a loud, rising whistle, and coming back together to return to the business of finding food. With luck, no one will be missing when they regroup.

A vocal animal, groups of this squibis chatter and cluck amongst each other nearly all the time, making many different calls for many purposes. Mothers have different variations of call for their dependent young than they use to other adults, which are spoken slower and louder, as if to improve their clarity; these calls are learned, and when chicks grow a bit older and familiar with the call repertoire, the adults will no longer speak to them in this "baby talk" that may help them learn to communicate when very young. And though the valentine squibis lives in large groups, each individual has its own much smaller circle of social bonds - family and close friends - that overlap with those of some others, but not all. Within each "clique" a squibis is more inclined to share food it has discovered than it is with those outside the clique; traveling close by its closest friends, someone who finds a small amount of very good food will only advertise it with a whisper, so that no one further afield will be aware of it, but its buddies can come and share it. In contrast, a large amount of a less coveted food will be mentioned loudly, and the whole group can join in. Such cliques are long-lasting, and each individual will mainly preen only those within it. But cliques overlap, as every member of each one does not have only the same friends. In this way, through shared extended friend groups, even very large flocks of squibis remain bonded together, even when it would be difficult if not impossible for every single member to personally know every other individual.

The scuba scuttlebird is the sole representative of a sister genus to all other scuttlebirds, including the sanddiver. It is the smallest species of all these armored burdles at only four inches in length, and favors a habitat no other species is suited to: rivers. Most scuttlebirds sink like stones. Covered in heavy plating that protects against predators - and which is formed from keratin-covered solid bone - to fall into deep water is likely to result in death by drowning. So most scuttlebirds stick firmly to dry land. The scuba scuttlebird, though, is exceptional. Because it has become so little, it has evolved the ability to perform a quite impressive little trick. The finely scaled skin on its head - shaped slightly like a crescent moon, with a prominent crest - is hydrophobic, repelling water. This is a trait shared by other scuttlebirds, which are adapted to hold a small air bubble over their nostrils to prevent water from entering their lungs if they find themselves in wet conditions such as rainstorms, or if a burrow floods - conditions that could cause them to drown, even while technically on land, as these animals are very low to the ground and unable to quickly find higher ground. But only the scuba scuttlebird is small enough that it can exploit this to let it purposely enter normally fatal submerged environments. It favors riverine shores to make its burrows, and readily dives underwater. As it does so it exhales, and its breath is held between the water-repellent scales of its head, forming a layer of trapped air that the scuba scuttlebird is small enough to rely on to respire while underwater, and thus survive submersion for much longer than any other species.

No longer simply a life-support strategy in case of emergency, the scuba scuttlebird uses its personal air tank to hunt for food underwater, using its large claws to overturn stones and dig into the sediment to locate worms, crustaceans, and small fish that now make up its diet. It inhales from its stored air bubble several times during its underwater forays, and in between these breaths there is a limited amount of gas exchange with the surrounding water, which both helps to replenish oxygen into the reserve and removes harmful carbon dioxide. There is still a limit to the bubble's use, for the scuttlebird's need for oxygen eventually becomes greater than the bubble can replenish it, but it can still stay underwater for up to 20 minutes - some five times as long as its lung capacity alone would permit. The scuba scuttlebird makes the most of each trip under the waves and may scurry up to ten feet underwater in its hunts. Usually it has a skillfull memory of its steps, and will re-trace its path back up to the riverbank after around eight minutes, giving it a little extra time to get back to land before it runs out of air. But if it needs to be quicker, it can swim; only this scuttlebird has evolved webbed feet, and though it is very heavy for its size, it can nonetheless paddle its way straight upwards in an emergency to snatch a breath of air before dropping back down to the bottom. This is also useful to escape predators, though the animal's very thorny armor is already a deterrent to most, being highly resistant to crushing, difficult to pry apart, and very hard to swallow whole. Young scuttlebirds, almost always hatched in litters of two, cannot effectively dive for around eight weeks after hatching and remain in burrows until that time, accessible only via an underwater entrance. Even after they can swim, mothers will tend their young and aid them in finding food for up to eight months before the two part. When first learning to travel underwater, chicks will most often grasp on claw around the upward-curved spikes on their mother's tail, and likewise the next chick in line will hold its sibling this way, so the group form a train and no one gets lost.

There is another unrivaled predator of the stormveld, one which has no allies, but it has only a small range around Split River. The stormserpent is a large predatory skuorc that is absent from the western stormveld, but common here. Stormserpents, a type of ratsnake closely related to the aukoconda, are the world's largest skuwyrms, and can reach a length of 30 feet. They are not merely long, but truly massive; their bodies can reach 3 feet across, and the biggest specimens will tip the scales at around 2,000 lbs. These virtually legless skuorcs, which have only small hind claws used to help them line up to mate, are too heavy in adulthood to move overland except in an extremely laborious barrel roll. But they do not need to. They can wait for the land to disappear. A stormserpent can go as long as 30 months between meals, slowing its heartbeat to just a few beats an hour, in an incredibly long and sleepy torpor until conditions are just right. It wakes only in the midst of large scale flooding, enough to submerge vast stretches of the veld underwater for days or even weeks at a time. Such brief but expansive floods occur between twice a year and every two years along the west fork of Split River in most decades, depending on how much rain has fallen to fill its central drainage. This is just often enough for this serpent to endure the dry periods. And when the deluge of floodwater arrives, the hunt is on.

The stormserpent is fast and powerful with water to support its bulk, and is a constrictor that squeezes the life from its prey by wrapping other animals in the grip of their long bodies and tightening their coils. As the waters rise and the grazing herds rush to higher ground, the serpent ambushes them as they become concentrated on what little land is left emersed, like a fridge stocked with morsels. It capitalizes on the chaos of natural disasters that most animals flee, in its element as the land is temporarily transformed into a delta. For as long as the water covers the land the serpent gorges itself, eating itself to the point of distention. It has only a short time to get enough calories stored to last potentially two more years, if the next flood is delayed, and it makes the most of it. Soon though, the floods drain off across the landscape, and the water will soon disappear. It is then that the stormserpent will begin to burrow itself down into the mud, dislodging the roosts of the grasses that hold the soil together in less saturated times and jostling its huge body side to side to create a deep groove in the muck. It does this for several days, sinking below the substrate up to nine feet deep. When the flood is over and the ground has dried, it will be entombed, and not able to escape even if it wanted to - not until the next flood turns the soil back to loose mud, and allows it to push its way back to the world of the living.

Only the adult stormserpent can live this way. Its young cannot afford to go so long without a meal, and are small and light enough to slither over land and hunt from the day they emerge; it will take at least ten years for them to begin to hibernate for short periods between floods, and even then they may take another 10 years more before they are truly too big to move on land at all and are then entirely reliant on this strategy to survive other predators. Stormserpents mate during flood cycles and then, remarkably, do not give birth again until the next one, even if it takes two years to come. Their young are connected to the parent via an umbilical, and once fully developed will enter a torpor state while being nourished by the mother, waiting until conditions suit her emergence and their subsequent ejection into the outside world. She provides them no further care once they are born, though they may spend a day with her before they adjust to the wider world now before them and go off their separate ways; the adult's diet of large warm-blooded vertebrates means that her young are safe from her appetite; she may not be maternal, but at least she doesn't recognize them as food.

The baba clawga is a predatory burdle and a very near relative of the creeping clutchclaw, which evolved from that latter species or from its immediate precursor. It is native only to the westernmost edge of the stormveld biome, near the Tempest Sea, and been isolated from its relative for at least 800,000 years by the west fork of Split River that lies to the south. This species very closely resembles its cousin, though is around 25% smaller, has more contrasted facial markings, and has longer scutes along the back and limbs. Where they differ most apparently is in their behavior: baba clawgas, but never clutchclaws, are tool-users which construct elaborate creations by weaving together grass stems. This is used for camouflage, hiding them from their prey and from larger predators, and their use of such a blind to sneak close to their victims makes them especially difficult to detect - they are among the most likely predators to steal the young of ground nesting birds, even such fierce ones as the skystalker. But their cloaks are more than cover; they are effectively moveable nests, complete with storage, and provide an ingenious way to carry caches of food with them, always kept close at hand and away from thieves. Their grassy covers hide them when they sleep, and even help keep out rain. Their name, a pun on the Baba Yaga witch of folklore, references their appearance when on the move beneath their lumpy tapestry of woven grass, resembling a hut that walks along on bird-like feet. Only noticeable when in motion, the baba clawga will freeze if it finds it is being observed and if necessary it may stand unmoving for several hours, so that its presence can be dismissed as merely the wind on the plains... a false sense of security, perhaps, to a nesting bird who may drift off to sleep for just a moment. And that is when it will strike, swiftly clearing any distance to the nest, taking its victim, and vanishing like the wind. A phantom in the grass.

But why did baba clawgas become skilled artisans that weave grasses for cover, while most clutchclaws do not? The precursor behavior to this would be the nesting instinct of a female clutchclaw, who will put together a simple nest of grasses woven together for her eggs. Usually, she will tend the nest for only one or two days, as she lays her clutch and then ensures they are sufficiently buried in the grass pile so that as it decomposes, the warmth will provide just enough for their growth without overheating them. But very rarely, a mother clutchclaw early in the nesting process will lift her eggs and move them to a safer site, if she feels she has been threatened by a potential predator, or if she determined the site unsuitable, and she may carry part of the nest with the clutch as she does so to a new site where a new nest will quickly be made. The baba clawga's ancestors, once separated from the wider population, may have had a higher than average percentage of such innovative mothers among them due to their proximity to the seasonally flooding split river, which could drown many nests except for those whose mothers would carry them to higher ground when the waters rose, and so once separated from the wider population, genetic drift would favor a quick spread of this beneficial behavior. Evidence for this origin of the mobile nest can be seen in how the baba clawga is a more attentive parent than her sister species, for she does not abandon her nests, but will supervise them at a distance and visit them throughout the incubation period to ensure that they remain secure. Only once they hatch does she at last leave them to their own fates.

It is likely that the female baba clawga began covering itself with nesting material outside the times she was moving her eggs, perhaps first for no reason except because her instincts told her to carry something; many animals will sometimes exhibit misfired behaviors like this, which are usually not of any consequence. But if carrying grass, and obscuring its form, improved hunting success, than this inconsequential accidental habit becomes consequential, and it will be perpetuated, so that the next generation may be even more inclined to do it, even if they do not understand why. Once the habit began, it would quickly be refined to further improve survival success. A simple heap of grass wrapped around themselves would gradually become the woven basket-like carried nests of the modern species; learning to store food within it would perhaps be the last stage in the process, transferring an instinct to cache in the environment to storing food only in one small, moveable part of the environment they would always keep with them. Eventually males, too, would begin to weave these nests, once all the females already were, because those which carried grass had better survival rates than those that did not, regardless of sex. The crossing over of the trait from the female only to the male would possibly correlate with some other parental-related traits, and in the baba clawga we also see males that are not generally cannibalistic to their own kind's young, which is a stark contrast to the clutchclaw. It may be related to the acquisition of such maternal tendencies, a spillover effect from an incomplete nesting instinct that the male now exhibits because it benefits him in other ways, even though he does not partake in childcare. Yet because the habit of wearing moveable nests originated in the female, she still creates the better and longer-lasting ones today, while those of males are often temporary, discarded and re-woven frequently, and rarely as large or neatly made. And at least one reason males may often lose their nests is that they have come to serve as a shield from at least one other danger: the females. Though baba clawgas are less likely to eat unwanted suitors as clutchclaws, the risk is still there. But because they are protected in their moving nests when they visit a mate, the male is more likely to survive an encounter that goes awry thanks to his cloak of grass being in between him and the female's claws; she will often be left with only his nest in her clutches as he slips out the bottom of it and makes his escape. Thanks to their retention of these once unnecessary nesting instincts, male baba clawgas - unlike creeping clutchclaws - now have a life expectancy similar to that of the females.

There is a group of skuorcs found only on Serinaustra; combining traits from several other related lineage, the lacertatheres' closest relatives are the chamarmotoos, skuzzards (including skuwyrms), and skuossums (including skungarus).  It sits as a sister group on the great tree of life to the common ancestor of all three of those clades, which rafted to Serinaustra as long as 15 million years ago. Lacertatheres, which means "lizard beasts", range in size from about as big as a small dog to the size a bear, and true to their name they broadly resemble large lizards in body shape, though not quite to the degree of the skuzzards. They are ancestrally semi-arboreal, with sharp claws and grasping tails to cling to branches, like chamarmotoos. Like some chamarmotoos, and also like skungarus, lacertatheres are also capable of bipedal locomotion: their front limbs are shorter than their hind, giving them a sloped-back posture when on four legs. When on twco legs they balance in a horizontal pose by their long, heavy tails, but they are slow-moving and not adapted to run. They have wedge-shaped heads with strong jaws, short but robust bills, and are generally omnivorous but specific species can easily specialize into either herbivores or carnivores, like most skuorc lineages. Many have evolved varied sorts of physical defenses to counter their slow running speed, which are most developed in the larger forms that may also be poor climbers.

Caiguanas are a small family of larger lacertatheres which have evolved some, though not all, of the body feathers into plate-like integument resembling a pangolin's scales. Different species exhibit varying coverage of this plating, which ranges from being only present on the back to covering all but the lower surface of the belly which is always lined with soft feathers. Some non-modified plumage persists growing in between the specialized plates in all species too, emerging in tufts between the "scales". No other skuorc has multiple types of integument occurring together on the same areas of the body in this way, though these scales are not homologous with those of most skuorcs, but are instead another modified type of feather. Caiguanas rely on this armored covering to resist attacks by predators which might bite at their backs or their throats. These animals typically live near water and are strong swimmers; they will dive when threatened, but are not only passive in their avoidance of danger. They may also attempt to drown predators which follow them in by grasping them in their forearms and shoving them beneath themselves underwater.

The curlytail caiguana of the split river region of the stormveld is the most basal caiguana, and the only one which still retains a prehensile tail, though only the tip can still be folded around. These solitary animals that dwell along the river basin can weigh up to five hundred pounds and are mainly plant-eaters when grown, though young also actively chase and catch insects and the odd small bird. Adults don't hunt on purpose, but they are indiscriminate enough grazers that they collect a not-unsubstantial amount of insects and crustaceans with each mouthful of grass that they tear from its roots with their tooth-like oral keratin spines. This contributes to their nutrition by making up as much as 10% of their total caloric intake. Curlytail caiguanas sport fully formed plate-feathers only on their dorsal surface, and can raise or lower them not only to make themselves appear larger and harder to eat, but also to regulate their temperature either by angling them into the sun or letting wind hit the skin underneath them to warm up or cool down depending on environmental conditions. Though this species has partially webbed hind feet and both eyes and nostrils set high on the body as in semi-aquatic animals, it strongly prefers to forage for food on land, and may travel up to half a mile from water by night to do so.

Perhaps the only remaining use of the grasping tail, already lost in its relatives, is to gather grass for use as nesting material; this caiguana creates long-lasting elevated roosts above the waterline by piling vegetation into a mattress-like structure up to eight feet high and twenty feet around, burrowing its way into the structure to sleep as well as to give birth. Though females do not actively provide care for their young, they do not chase them from their nest, and the offspring will hide from danger within their mother's den and emerge to feed nearby for up to six months before becoming fully independent. The nests of males are significantly smaller and simpler in comparison and much more often re-built as they are less territorial, and more likely to follow females up and down the river in a nomadic lifestyle. They try to attract mates by calling in a low, deep voice that is best compared to the lowing of cattle, though more resonant, and their voice brings with it its own echo all times as the caiguana calls with a syrinx, a vocal organ common to ancestral birds but now rare in skuorcs, which lets them produce two notes at the same time. Several male curlytails may trail one receptive female and try to woo her by out-singing their rivals until their collective voices rise into a deafening clatter; singing often occurs while partly submerged in water, producing rippling effects at its surface that may be part of the attraction. These males, though competing, do not generally engage in physical confrontations - and though this species is solitary, they rarely fight in general, save for an occasional whack of the tail at a neighbor who has gotten a little too close for comfort. The female ultimately chooses which if any suitor suits her, usually under quiet cover of darkness after the male's daytime songs have ebbed out, and she has had time to think over the options.

The mangleraptor is a comparatively large, robust raptothere skuorc of up to 600 lbs, which is descended from the skiger, still native to northern Serinaustra. In many ways it is has become the southern hemisphere analogue to the vultrorcs of Serinarcta. It has convergently acquired a vaguely similar dog-like body shape, though it remains plantigrade, indicating it is more of an ambush predator than a pursuit hunter. The largest fully terrestrial skuorc on Serinaustra, it is a locally rare example of an apex predator skuorc, existing alongside the brawler scroungers, with both feeding often on trunkos and giraffowl. It stalks its quarry in vegetated areas at the edges of forests, often near water, creeping quietly until it as close to the target as possible before rushing out and going in for the kill. Their skulls are very large, up to 26 inches long, and their bite force has greatly increased from their predecessor, giving them the strength needed to bring down animals their own size and larger, usually with a clamping bite to the throat.

Something that looks and acts between a bear and a komodo dragon, mangleraptors are generally solitary but not aggressively territorial and may exhibit mobbing behavior where multiple animals may join the fray and "assist" another in killing a large target, though their motivations are quite selfish. The animals may then feed together with minimal aggression, as long as the carcass is big enough, though larger individuals tend to take the best parts for themselves in a simple hierarchy based on physical strength. Males are most tolerant of females within their territories, but less so of other males, though much smaller, younger competitors may be agile enough to outmaneuver old, battle-worn males and so ultimately remain in their territories, occasionally stealing scraps of their kills and mating with the smaller of the local females that may be pushed out of the most ideal habitat by the oldest members of the population.

There is no parental care, and 10-15 pound young are dropped in litters of 3 to 8 to scatter and fend for themselves. Though fully mature adults, which reach their maximum size around 12 years of age, cannot easily catch them, they are heavily preyed upon by adolescents just a year or two older than them. Only a very small percentage successfully run this cannibal gauntlet and reach eventual sexual maturity, beginning around 7 years old. Young mangleraptors, in addition to biting, can whip their tails at the faces of enemies with enough force to cause injury; the tail of the juvenile is semi-prehensile and aids in climbing trees to flee danger, but by adulthood the tail has stiffened and is no longer usable in this way, though it remains flexible at its base and useful as a defensive whip to lash a rival in a fight over a mate.

above: the split river snapjaw is an osteopulma bird with two very different possible female adults, depending on the environment the larva grows up in.