The flood forest of northern Serinarcta is a wet and soggy place to be at any time of the year. But every so often, it experiences surges of water that may submerge all but the tallest crowns of its trees for weeks or months at a time, requiring its animals be strong swimmers and able to adapt to drastic changes of habitat with little notice. 

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290 million years PE, Northern Serinarcta is still a place of wetlands, even as more southern regions become drier as the hothouse age progresses. Though the nightforest in the northwest is elevated and so has a lower water table than surrounding areas, the north pole itself is centered over the vast inland sea of the Polar Basin, and this giant body of freshwater is in turn surrounded by a multitude of shallow, vegetated waterways in a region known as the Upperglades, which now includes the majority of Serinarcta's remaining soglands (vast, flooded grasslands.) Here, as rivers drain the abundant rainwater from all across the continent, the land is broken up by many lakes and streams which differ from those of the longdark swamp mostly in being flowing water rather than stagnant. Most of the time, all of this water filters downward to its final resting place in the basin, but occasionally the basin overflows and the flow of the water reverses, with temporary rivers forming that dump the excess back out across the land, or even into the sea. In this way, the upperglades include a secondary biome that is one of the most unique on Serina: the flood forest, a jungle environment that is irregularly inundated with enough water to reach to the tops of the trees. 

The upperglades is the home of many widespread animal groups: thorngrazers, tribbybaras, river dragons, and skuorcs of all kinds are abundant across the varied habitats of this region. But it is also the home to some animals that don't occur anywhere else, including the largest example of the "primitive" bumblets alive, the lurking murkmole. While primitive bumblets is not a technical term - all other bumblets, including gravediggers and huge dolfinches - evolved from this evolutionary grade - it refers well to the surviving descendants of the wormslayer, which have changed much less than other lineages since the Thermocene when early quadrupedal bumblets arose. While these bumblets are much later derived than those species, and share an advanced viviparous reproductive system with other living forms, their anatomy otherwise appears very basal to the group; they have hard, skin-covered, featherless jaws with tooth-like protrusions and no apparent beak, for the hard nail of the beak was lost and secondarily developed in the ancestors of both dolfinches and gravediggers. They have sprawling forelimbs with two claws, and cannot walk upright. And in the case of the lurkmoles, they have no eyes and are completely and utterly blind, for they evolved for so many millions of years as burrowing animals underground, and now live in an environment that is pitch black for several months out of every year.

Lurking murkmoles are fairly large aquatic predators, only a little smaller than a grown man, that evolved from much smaller burrowers around ten million years ago. Swimming and digging result in similar arm-powered, rounded body shapes, and so burrowing animals usually swim very well - and if they then stop burrowing, they can get much larger in water very rapidly. Sight is also of little function both in tunnels and in dark, murky water, and so murkmoles have adapted to get by with touch in its place, using their sensitive snouts and long whiskers connected to deep nerve pits in the skull to sense their surroundings. For much of the year, their diet is mainly composed of sedentary bottom-dwelling fish and aquatic invertebrates like worms that they dig out of the mud - they are not the fastest swimmers, and without sight, sonar, or electroreception, they lack the fast responses necessary to chase and catch food that can move quickly to dodge them in open water. When the forest floods, however, they take advantage of their increase in territory to hunt land animals as they are pressed into small, elevated places to escape the water. They can smell well above water, and hone in on prey there, snatching them from the land like crocodiles and even using their sturdy arm claws to climb up the trunks of the waterlogged trees to catch creatures caught in their branches with nowhere to go. This is the best time of year for these unusual predators, and for a few months, a blind, subterranean swimmer gets to know what it's like to live high in the treetops, a place it would never otherwise be, were it not for these unusual and specific conditions that occur nowhere else. And it is not the only creature that does so in this environment.

The tree tribbo is perhaps the most ungainly and unexpected tree-dwelling animal that has ever lived. A small, basal species of tribbocampus, this tribbybara descendant is far smaller than its fully aquatic cousins, and is solitary  - but it is still is very adapted for life in water, with a fluked tail fin and short, webbed limbs. Indeed, most of the time it isn't arboreal - during regular water levels, it is highly aquatic. This shy and timid creature usually sticks to isolated, shallow ponds and calm inlets of rivers where it feeds along the water's edge, sometimes wandering a few hundred feet from water in the night to graze, and can easily dip below the surface to hide from threats. But whenever the forest floods - anywhere from every six months to every two or three years in most cycles - the tree tribbo finds itself in far deeper and more turbulent water in which it can no longer hide. Larger aquatic predators enter the forest when water levels rise - hunters usually kept out by the shallow water that can easily kill the mostly defenseless tribbo at that time. So this little molodont is forced upwards, using small but sharp claws to haul itself up the trunks of the trees and onto branches that will support them. It isn't all bad for the tribbo - it can then take advantage of leaves it could never reach at any other time, clambering slowly along the broader branches and clipping the shoots off with its teeth.

 It is not without danger here either - nocturnal rasps in particular may take advantage of a new source of meat that joins them in their treetop realm - but the trees of the flood forest rarely connect at their canopies, meaning that any climbing hunter seeking to hunt the tribbo can only approach from below, giving it the time to drop down into the water from the end of a branch and flee to another tree. Occasionally, of course, this can sometimes leave the hapless tribbo caught between the choice of death from above or from below.

The flood forest typically only floods for one to three months at a time. Afterward, the water disperses southwards and east to the ocean along temporarily reversed rivers, and the basin's water levels drop below the height of its rim once more. The tree tribbo can safely return back to the ground - sometimes quite inelegantly, if it waits too long and finds itself above dry ground when it flops back down - and life returns to a quiet ebb until the next flow. 

Not all who climb to the canopy of the flood forest do so to escape. Some take advantage of the rising waters to ascend to the treetops to hunt. Fortunately for the tree tribbo, the clambering eeldrake is too small to pose a threat. Rather, this 3 foot long predator leaves its usual aquatic haunts to pursue littler molodonts like the molmos and seedsnatchers that the rising waters might trap in a single tree with nowhere to go. A truly amphibious creature, this small sea dragon resembles in many ways far earlier eelsnakes of the Thermocene, but differs in its well-developed, arm-like pectoral fins, the rays of which are sharply hooked claws that let it pull itself up the trees with ease. With no tail fin, the eeldrake is not a rapid swimmer, but it doesn't need to be; in water, it sneaks up on prey near the water's edge and then strikes, snake-like, and drags them below water to drown while on land its tail - indeed, most of its serpentine body - can be wrapped around branches and used as a third climbing limb. With both gills and lungs, it can move freely between either realm, and live indefinitely both below and above water. If only it could fly, the adaptable clambering eeldrake could quite possibly rule the world.

In daylight, the skin of the clambering eeldrake shimmers with dark blue and green iridescence, but when it emerges to hunt in the dark of night it is nearly invisible against the bark and branches of the forest trees, and so can sneak up quietly unseen toward sleeping prey. Its vision is excellent, but its sense of smell is even better; taste buds line its entire mouth as well as the whisker-like barbels of its face. Though this works best underwater, kept damp by licking they also serve to taste the air for scent molecules to let it hone it on food that may be hiding in small holes in the tree. With its eel-like form, these predators can then enter any hole wide enough for their jaws, cornering their victims and pulling them out of their would-be refuge. Small bite-sized prey on land is killed by vigorously shaking it and smacking it against the tree, while bigger animals are strangulated within the coils of its body. The diet of this sea dragon is always made up of animals it can swallow in one piece, as it lacks jaws or teeth suited to rip pieces from a carcass like its larger relatives can do. Clambering eeldrakes are also the only omnivorous eelsnakes; their regular upward excursions frequently bring them to clusters of hanging fruit, which they will swallow whole and gain some additional nutrition from, while also serving as an unexpected seed disperser. 

Not all animals of the flood forest need to climb to reach the treetops. Some can access them while keeping their foot firmly on the ground. The scalpture, a tall-browsing biped that reaches a height in excess of 20 feet. A strongly vertical, thinly-built animal, it is the biggest of all skungarus. The skungarus, a clade of bipedal, mostly-hopping skuorcs, have spread across the northern continent in a very rapid radiation of forms since their appearance just ten million years ago. Live-bearing birds that have hit upon the very successful "primitive dinosaur" body shape and energy-efficient leaping movement, they also tend toward a very generalized diet, allowing them to survive nearly anywhere. Skungarus have claimed forests and plains, and have even made movements to reach the skies. In northern Serinarcta, several species call the upperglades and the flood forest their home, all exhibiting unique and different traits from one another to let them thrive in an environment very unlike the grasslands their ancestors first evolved upon.

The scalpture has evolved to move through denser forests than can the cygnosaurs, and in more difficult to traverse, seasonally flooded places than the similarly tall tree trunks (trunkos of the nightforest) prefer. Dark and dingy, its coloration matches the mossy, shaded background of its upperglades habitat where it steps quietly between tall, creaking trees and regularly traverses rivers and swamps, swimming low in the water with only its neck above, and propelled by its sturdy tail like a crocodile; this tail is also used to prop itself up like a third limb while it stretches to reach tall branches, which it pulls down within reach of its beak with its most apparent attributes: a set of six deadly, raking claws that double as deadly weapons against predator, and sometimes as well against prey, for the scalpture is still very much an omnivore. It supplements a leaf-based diet with any animal it can catch, swatting birds and molmos out of trees, and even striking land animals as large as wumpos, often sneaking up on them in the shadows as they graze and raking them across the face. It also uses its claws to open the carcasses, as its narrow beak is ill-adapted for it.

Solitary and belligerent, scalptures avoid danger well between their cryptic habits, hard to access habitat, and ornery demeanor combined with their strong defenses, not just their claws but also the ability to rise onto their tails and kick forward with enough strength to kill most predators. They also fight amongst themselves, at least others of their own sex, in territorial contests that involve facing up and locking claws, each trying to shove its opponent over. Fights between females are short-lived, and most often occur only when they have young with them. Males, however, will fight until bloody and badly injured over mating opportunity and such contests may last more than a day. Because they have few threats beyond their own kind, scaptures only produce a single offspring at a time, and only one per year. Dependent on its mothers care for most of that time, it is driven off on its own before the next young is born, at which time it stands around ten feet high. Though juveniles like this are already aggressive and able to feed themselves, they form temporary bands with like-aged peers for safety until sexual maturity is reached around three years of age, as they are still small enough to be killed by enemies such as river dragons and sawjaws. Like some dinosaurs, however, scalptures do not stop growing at sexual maturity, and though it slows after four years of age, it never entirely stops and so exceptionally old individuals can reach or even slightly exceed heights of thirty feet. By this time they are already heavy enough to sink into the murky ground of the forest, however, and so ultimately their indeterminate growth is maladaptive. Most individuals die before reaching their ultimate final size except on certain islands within the polar basin where cygnosaurs are not present and so the scalpture can take the role of largest herbivore and move into more open settings. As would be expected, animals in these habitats reach the most exceptional sizes and live the longest lives, perhaps to a century, whereas elsewhere they may live to just forty years on average.

Maybe it's just something about the flood forest that can make animals mean. The constant dampness, darkness, and difficulty traversing the environment could make anyone bad-tempered. There is another aggressive skungaru living here, one which barely comes up to its huge relative's ankle, and yet which is among the most ferocious of them all. The tacklesnatcher is a relative of the night forest's ticklemonster. Both of these skungarus are distinctive among their group for their carnivorous leanings; neither eats significant amounts of vegetation, and both are selected toward predatory behavior and catch food with the use of their forearms. This is most evident in this larger species which is found slightly more south of its relative in the dismal upperglades region. Growing to a length over 7 feet with its tail and weighing 120 pounds, the tacklesnatcher kills animals that can be up to twice its own weight by leaping onto them and digging a sickle-like finger claw on either hand into the neck to violently and bloodily suffocate them or to rip open their neck artery. 

It is the only skungaru with a serrated beak adapted to rip flesh. It is a solitary, stalking predator that hunts by surprise, using the dark and damp environment to its advantage to sneak close up on its victims unseen. Like other skungarus of all but the largest size, it hops to get around, but this animal can also walk on all fours, something that most of the herbivorous species can no longer do effectively. This lets it creep up more quietly before striking, and this reversion to a four-legged gait is likely an extension of an increase in arm-powered tree climbing behavior also exhibited by the tacklesnatcher, which typically roosts above ground and so avoids being caught in flash floods while asleep.

When awake, however, the tacklesnatcher is also a strong swimmer, and is borderline semi-aquatic - it has to be to survive in the flood forest. Its plumage, though sparse, is very greasy and water repellent, and may aid in its buoyancy. Using its scaly tail to push itself along, it can tread water for more than fifteen hours, and has been known to follow its nose and swim miles out to sea and reach offshore bird colonies on which it can prey, as well as into the polar basin during the summer when it is covered in vegetation. There, it sometimes forgoes a typical nocturnal preference to catch fishes and other marine life from the surface of the water, leaping from a perch to catch them and then dragging them back to dry land to feed. On drier land, most of its victims are small trunkos, tribbybaras, and the young of gantuans.

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Swamp skungarus are a medium-sized skungaru species weighing some 220 pounds which is far less hostile than their contemporary relatives sharing their habitat. They too are endemic to the sogland biome now most widespread in the southern upperglades, but they are not carnivores, nor are they especially unpleasant in nature. Some might even call them pretty - these birds exhibit a greater coverage of feathers than many relatives, with only the lower legs, hands, and tail instead sporting scaled hide. Their outer plumage is very coarse, sharp to the touch like steel wool, and very oily to repel water; this overlays a much softer, fluffier layer of down that provides insulation from the water, and which remains dry even after lengthy swims. This double layer of feathers, while common among other birds, is unique to this genus of skungaru, as most species have short, sparse feathers if any at all.

These animals, unlike their cousins here, are gregarious, living in herds of ten to over a hundred, feeding typically near water and within it to a depth of up to five feet; they are buoyant, and this aids in swimming at the surface, allowing them to feed on submerged plants by "dabbling", or sticking their necks underwater while remaining afloat. Skungarus such as these outnumber thorngrazers in very wet landscapes and are among the most common herbivores of this region, for they are generally better at navigating flooded land and deep water than these competitors. Swamp skungarus can leap agiley through flooded grasslands, and can outrun most enemies in such conditions that tire and bog down non-leaping animals. They swim with a combination of their strong kicking legs and a specialized tail that is flattened vertically like an eel's, functioning like a paddle. Most of the diet is vegetation, supplemented by any insects and small animals that are come across. The beak is long and slightly flattened at its distal edge like a duck's, for the same reasons, making it more effective to skim food in water, such as floating vegetation and insect larvae.  Female swamp skungarus gather their two to three chicks onto their backs when making deep water crossings; in shallow water, she will pick them up in her forearms and carry them until they become stronger swimmers.

Male swamp skungarus are a dark steel blue shade with white eyebrow markings, snouts, and throats. Females are a light chocolate brown, lacking any eyebrow stripes, but sharing the throat and snout markings. Social groups are generally divided by sex, with nursery groups comprised of females and their young being the larger of the two, while bachelor groups comprised of males are usually less than 15 animals. A small number of males in a given group usually dominate the rest and sire most offspring, and so while males still associate together for defense against predators, it is not beneficial for more than a few males to stay together if they want to breed, so that male groups split into smaller herds frequently, while female groups will continue to grow. In both cases, but moreso in females, social bonds between group members are present and can persist for long periods of time. Female swamp skungarus in particular can remember at least 120 other individuals by sight; beyond this number, and groups become less cohesive and more prone to divide up into numbers everyone can keep track of, though multiple such herds can still gather together for safety in numbers. Females lack a dominance hierarchy and don't generally show aggression toward each other - most often, they aid in protecting each other's young, with older chicks being gathered together into a creche for safety.

Some skuorcs resemble dinosaurs. But their diversity is extremely wide, and others resemble very dissimilar animals - like snakes. Skuwyrms are probably the most derived-looking skuorcs, for among an assemblage of these animals that have come to resemble all sorts of animals - mammals, dinosaurs, and even dolphins - they are the only ones to have lost their limbs completely, and the only birds to have done so outside a few clades of metamorph, most of which still have legged adult stages.

These birds have serpentine body shapes and move in a snake-like, undulating fashion. Some have developed other methods though. Trithons belong to a skuwyrm clade descended from ratsnakes, which "walk" their way along the ground more like a centipede on extensions of their vertebrae which extend out of the body cavity into keratinized, hollow "claws" on their ventral surfaces. These claws also give them excellent traction when climbing, and so many trithon species are arboreal. This clade is specifically named for their split lower jaws, which give them a total of three beaks around their mouth resembling a trident; the lower jaw is unconnected at its distal edge, allowing these animals to expand their jaws outward to swallow prey bigger than the width of their skull. It also gives them a fierce bite; trithons' beaks are very sharp and strongly hooked, and once latched onto a prey animal they don't let go. As trithons lack venom, they have had to rely on more aggressive means to kill their food. Their body is typically robust and muscular, and like a snake, these birds have evolved to wrap it around struggling victims and strangle them through constriction.

Trithons are all nocturnal, having good night vision as well as long facial whiskers that let them feel their way around their environment even in total darkness. These whiskers are the last vestiges of their plumage, as the warm, damp conditions of the northern swamps don't require they have any insulation. Young trithons are born with a coat of fuzzy feathers on their backs, however, which is shed within just a few weeks of birth. In their first few days, this plumage may serve to provide camouflage by breaking up their outlines against the forest backdrop, or it may be a totally vestigial feature. Both young and adult are completely solitary, ambush predators that can go weeks between meals. Chicks feed mainly on small flying birds, but mature adults of the largest species, such as Trijudex scolopendrens, are able to eat much larger, terrestrial animals.

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There are many types of megafaunal birds in the upperglades, and though skuorcs like the skungarus might seem especially well-suited to this environment due to their extraordinary physical adaptations, other groups get by without deviating as far from long-held anatomical constraints. A closely related sister species to the varied-colored and very widespread brindled birdbear (the generalist species), smaller barebilled birdbears are still relatively big, bipedal gravediggers descended from spirepryers, which can stand as high as 5 feet and weigh up to 150 lbs. As gravediggers, these birds are some of the most "limited" of all birds, for their lineage long ago lost their elbow joints and never again regain them, and yet despite this they remain successful due to their bright intelligence and adaptable behavior. This birdbear species is found in a much more restricted range in the flood forest biome in northern Serinarcta than their relative, and also has a less broad diet. They are the only species in their genus to have a mostly featherless snout, which has evolved in this species to limit the mess it gets on itself while feeding on one of is favored foods, honey produced by bee-like ant colonies high up in forest trees, as well as sugary sap that the trees produce during their dormant winter season. Both food sources are tapped by these animals with their massive claws, which they use to climb trees better than any other species in their genus, and to easily peel up bark and dig into the wood. But the sweet stuff is really more a treat to this birdbear, which really eats mostly insects, especially large wood-boring grubs. 

This diet overlaps highly with the red rasp over a narrow band of southern nightforest where both species' ranges may be found, and there these species are competitors, though the omnivory of the barebilled birdbear gives it some space to avoid direct competition where the two coexist, with those northernmost populations feeding more on plant foods than those in the flood forest. Red rasps are also smaller and better climbers, and will retreat to higher branches when confronted. Ruffed rasps, though they do not eat the same diet, pose a far greater danger to barebilled birdbears as they will prey on them, especially on their young. It is the presence of this other species as a predator that seems to really limit the intrusion of the birdbear further north, for though these large gravediggers are well-armed, their defenses pale in comparison to the jaws of this enemy. They are not aggressive, unlike some other species of their genus, and will flee from most threats except when protecting young.

Barebilled birdbears are the most arboreal species in their genus and always roost in trees, which lets them remain in the forest even through its flood cycles, during which they will either leap from tree to tree in search of food, or be forced to descend and swim to reach other trees, something they also do well. Night nests are created and abandoned every single evening from soft green shoots, and the bird rarely sleeps in the same tree twice except when females are raising young, which is done in a large, hollow tree above ground. Their tree-dwelling nature has produced some changes from other birdbears: their legs are less upright, meaning they are better climbers but not as efficient at walking long distances, and will drop onto all fours to run. Their hands can be pronated so that their claws face forward on the ground, a trait shared with other birdbears, and their fingers are longer and more dexterous, letting them grasp branches with a hand-like grip against their palms. Combined with an especially mobile shoulder joint (actually their original wrist, as it is for all bumblets) the barebilled birdbear can uniquely engage in a brachiation-like movement by swinging on vines and branches with its arms above its head. This unrestrained level of arm movement is not seen in any other gravedigger species. Viewed from below, this locomotion appears similar to that of large apes, and like them, these gravediggers will also use their climbing skills to reach other foods like fruits and birds' eggs that few other animals their size could reach in the forest, further demonstrating the wide range of diet typical of their genus. Predation of vertebrates, though, is very rare. Because most of their food is small, soft, and does not need much chewing, their jaws are weak and do not open very widely, giving them an ineffective killing bite. 

Other more easily observed species from other regions of the continent have less-known relatives living hidden away in this flooded landscape, too. Lesser snagglejaws are a close relative of the awe-inspiring arctic snagglejaw, but are much smaller and generally more reclusive, for they seem to know they are not the biggest animal around. These animals reach a maximum shoulder height of around five feet and weigh 250-430 pounds, less than a quarter the size of an adult arctic snagglejaw, and yet they are their closest relatives, the two lineages no more than 4.5 million years separated. Lesser snagglejaws exhibit a mixture of traits that muddy their ancestry. Is their small size an ancestral trait, or one derived from a bigger ancestor? It is, in fact, the latter - lesser snagglejaws have evolved from a larger ancestor of the arctic snagglejaw that shrunk secondarily, in order to better make use of the more crowded floodforest environment. For this reason, it is classified within the same genus as its cousin, even though its latin name - translating to "humped beast", scarcely applies to this animal that does not have the muscular back hump of its relative.

These foxtrotters are intelligent animals with a varied diet and even more variety of behaviors relied upon to get food. Like so many hothouse animals, but unlike their relative, lesser snagglejaws are opportunistic and are omnivores which supplement a diet comprised mostly of meat with significant amounts of plants. Their habitat preference is wooded wetlands and swamps with thick tree cover; here they can hide from larger rivals, often by climbing up the trees with their hooked claws - which first evolved to catch fish - to shelter in the low branches. Like the arctic snagglejaw, the lesser still loves fish and seeks this food out over most others, striking from shore or shallow water with its forearms, trying to swat unsuspecting prey out of the water. It has a shorter, blunter jaw than its relation, which is also flatter, and its teeth are also somewhat less recurved, reflecting a less specialized diet that also includes other small animals and plant foods, such as tree nuts, that blunt their teeth when chewed. Lesser snagglejaws sometimes eat a diet composed as much of 45% vegetable matter, and they even graze, using their wide, flat mouths to collect mouthfuls of grasses or floating pond weed. Unlike arctic snagglejaws, lesser ones are mobile on land and can cross many miles between water sources, being lightweight and long-legged. The fleshy lobes on their toes can even be retracted when walking, so as not to trip them up. This has allowed them to colonize a wider range, that though centered on the upperglades can sometimes take them as far south as the Centralian Sea.

Like all triyenas, lesser snagglejaws are socially complex, and though they find food alone, they usually share it with others in a group and den in a common site. This species is more consistently social than its northern relative; though arctic snagglejaws have lasting social bonds, and though they can gather in groups and socialize during the rich summer summer and fall seasons, they also spend long periods hunting alone and do not seem to miss company at those times. Lesser snagglejaws, however, live in clans year-round, and these clans are the main focus of their lives. The fundamental base of the social structure of the snagglejaws' common ancestor, the finfoot triyena, was comprised of a group of related females and their offspring. In the arctic snagglejaw, clan lines have become looser, and social relationships can be built with any animals, even those with no relation, though males typically stay close with their mothers throughout life. This is less so with lesser snagglejaws, for whom social structures are much more rigid, and males leave their mothers for good at adolescence. These animals are uniquely semi-eusocial. A dominant female - the matriarch - typically rules in a given territory, but allows her female siblings or grown daughters to live with her, so long as they defer to her rule. In a clan, only the lead female reproduces. Other females are not normally allowed to bear young, but are expected to help provide care for her litters.

Males do not live within the clan structure at all after sexual maturity - they are cast out and become vagrants, usually living in their own small bachelor groups that lack any dominance hierarchy and are generally stable social bonds that persist for long periods of time. They are then only permitted to enter female territories briefly when the dominant female is receptive to mate. Males don't fight over this chance, as they are slightly smaller than females, and the entire clan will defend their leader to ensure she is not pressured into mating if she does not want to. The breeding female will usually will mate with all of them in a group anyway, to ensure her young get the widest diversity of genes, but will aggressively reject relatives, even those she has never met, detecting similarities in their scents to her own. After mating, males are driven off, never knowing their young and not participating in their care. Snagglejaw ancestors all had male parental care, though, and lesser snagglejaws haven't been split-off from their families long enough to lose all traces of these once important social behaviors. An occasional complication sometimes arises within female clans when a subordinate female has become pregnant. Unless the female is willing to go out alone and leave her clan behind, this produces an unwanted additional litter of cubs, and the matriarch will find this very conflicting. Unlike some foxtrotters, it is very rare that she adopts young that are not her own. Yet, unlike most other predators, she also seems reluctant to kill babies; traces of her ancestors that were more open and welcoming are not full lost in her, either. Most often what she ends up doing is carrying the cubs some distance from the den and leaving them to the elements. If male bands happen upon these cubs, and they have not suffered alone too long, they may sometimes be overcome with enough vestigial parent instinct that they will adopt them. In such less common clan structures, it is eventually the female cubs which leave the band of males, opposite to the normal dispersal strategy, as they become instinctively repelled by the scents of familiar males at maturity - an ingrained tendency that avoids inbreeding. These females will instinctively seek out a female clan to join, starting at the bottom of the social ladder and submitting to the matriarch to do so. But unlike the matriarch's own young, these females will almost never eventually rise in rank to dominance. Grown up outside the clan, they will always be low-ranking helpers, raising cubs which aren't their own.

~~~

Thorngrazers live in the upperglades too. Species of the late hothouse come in a wide array of shape and size, but overall, no matter what they looked like, they have been a strongly land-lubbing group. Thorngrazers in general are - or until recently were - heavy animals with dense bodies weighed down by abundant bony armor, leaving them more likely to sink than swim. The hadropotomus of 285 MPE was a notable outlier, using its tall crest as a snorkel, and has been joined by a second semi-aquatic species now in the boghog.

Like the hadropotomus, the boghog - a descendant of the soghog - doesn't so much swim as walk and jump along the bottom of shallows, but it spends most of its life very close to water. A close relative of the smaller thornsaber, it shares a diet of animal flesh but has less ferocious habits, and is a specialist at eating clams. This food source tends to settle in the sediment in places regularly inundated with nutrient-rich floodwaters from the adjacent polar basin, and so it is right between these two biomes that the boghog is most often found. It has a set of long tusks on its maxilla that are independently mobile, and it uses them to poke through the mud and unearth its bivalve victims. It doesn't shuck them, merely grinding them between its teeth to pulverize them, shells and all - sometimes eating 200 per day. The boghog, which can weigh up to half a ton in some large males but usually tops out around 750 lbs, is neutrally buoyant thanks to the large deposits of fat it has adopted not to remain warm, but to float. This serves as compensation for its heavy bones and defensive bony nodules beneath its skin, which help protect it from bites from enemies. 

To weigh as much as the surrounding water, no more and no less, is a compromise between being able to spend time walking on the bottom to forage and being able to push themselves back to the surface to breath. In the far northern upperglades where they dwelll, floods cover the land more frequently - too often for many trees to take root - and so in an open landscape of low-growing marsh grasses crossed by many slow-flowing rivers and shallow lakes, with little cover. They must have access to water shallower than their height to rest but spend only short periods out of water, and usually only in the dark, as their rotund bodies easily overheat in the sun - the cost of being more buoyant in the water is struggling to dissipate body heat outside it. The water they feed in averages 73 degrees Fahrenheit (22 C), a comfortably cool temperature and much less than the 80 degree average of the air. Yet this is not the temperature animals deal with in the sun - it becomes all the more miserable with the radiated heat from sunlight, which can raise their skin temperature to over 110 degrees - fatal for more than a few minutes to this species that lacks mechanisms to disperse it. To keep cool they will lay in water that covers their bodies, with just their eyes and noses above, and may also roll in the mud to cake themselves as a sort of sunscreen.

The boghog lives in herds, though the size of these aggregations is limited based on their food supply, and herds must keep moving along as they deplete the local shellfish beds day to day. Ten animals is average, sometimes more or less, but the animal tries to avoid moving alone as it becomes more vulnerable predators with no-one to watch its back. Herds are patriarchal, ruled by a single large male, and smaller males linger outside his harems in bachelor groups, occasionally sneaking to mate with a female but risking severe injury or even death if he catches them.

Though clams are the food the boghog is best adapted to collect, it isn't a picky eater. It occasionally eats grass, which provides roughage and may improve digestion as fiber, though its stomach is small and simplified and doesn't get as much nutrients from it as its ancestors would. Like its thornsaber cousin, it is also capable of hunting vertebrate prey, though its longer tusks are more vulnerable to fracture, and so it can only kill smaller animals. A phenomenon sometimes observed is cannibalism by bands of bachelor males upon the young of females in harems, which may use their combined strength in numbers to steal a calf and drag it away to kill and eat. Doing so not only provides a nutritious, fat-rich meal, but also causes the female to become receptive to breed again - possibly this time with one of them instead of the harem ruler.

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Though boghogs are big for tribbetheres, thanks to their aquatic nature, no molodont which walks on land can ever outsize the largest birds, as their tripedal locomotion is simply unsuited to weight-bearing at great sizes. The wumbo, though has no such issues. It is one of the biggest Serinarctan trunkos. Native to northern Serinarcta, these birds are highly social wetlands-dwellers, and are notable ecosystem engineers for the way they influence their biome by removing trees, gradually changing the course of the flowing water, loosening detritus trapped amongst their roots, and keeping these vast landscapes from becoming stagnant and overgrown. Though very associated with water, much of the wumbo's diet is tree bark, and it is often seen scraping a notch into it from younger sapling trees with its sharp beak, then peeling it downward in long strips with its long trunk. If a tree is completely girdled - has bark stripped all around its trunk - it will die, uproot, and eventually float away in a flood, but before then it will spend several years decomposing, during which time it becomes vital habitat for insects, species which prey on said insects, and species which rely on rotting wood to nest, like scarreots. In feeding as it does, the wumbo directly increases the biodiversity of its habitat.

Descendants of the swamp wumpo, wumbos are now many times larger, weighing over a ton and standing up to eleven feet high. They are so big as to have become virtually bald - plumage does little at such a scale and becomes only a hindrance to heat dispersal and a habitat for parasites - though small, vestigial feather clumps remain on the neck and back. Keeping cool is important to this relative giant, living in such hot and humid habitat as it does, and the dewlap of its ancestor is now larger too, a loose, dangling skin structure that attaches all the way up the side of its cheeks, and which can be fanned outward to catch a breeze and help the cool down the animal's blood.

The size, social nature, and the relative difficulty of traversing their often flooded, forested habitat mean the wumbo has few significant predators as an adult. Subjugators are their primary enemies, but wumbos are intelligent and cooperative and pose a difficult target unless caught quickly and unaware. As such, these predators often hunt at night, when the wumbo's eyesight is weaker, but even then it can scent an enemy from a great distance. When threatened, herds of wumbos will form a circle around their vulnerable and emit loud, terrifying booming calls, striking outward at their foe with a large defensive claw on their innermost toe (common to many wumpos.) If offense seems unable to protect them, they may scatter and flee into deep water, where they will dive and sink to the bottom much like a hippopotamus - this is more common with juveniles which are caught away from their elders. 

Wumbos are smart, in the way most trunkos are. But further north in the upperglades, there live a strange, fascinating population of trunkos which are especially ingenious. They have mastered something very few creatures have: agriculture. In the same way that other birds can evolve to create complex woven nests over thousands of generations, so to have the hookjaw carnackle's descendants become ever more competent at collecting fish for their consumption. Now their methods are very complex indeed, for rather than rely on wild fish stocks, they have domesticated their food supply and learned to rear them in artificial ponds dug out in shallow muddy areas. These trunkos remarkable skills are partly innate and partly cultured. The young are born with an instinctive drive to weave with reeds, which ultimately is cultivated through the efforts of the adults into great skill in simple tool use. These birds, the farmackles, skillfully create nets that rival human artisans and which are used not only to collect fish from their ponds when the time comes to eat, but also to partition adult fish away from their young (which they would consume) and to lay over the ponds, keeping flying predators from being able to swoop in and take any. Though they use few other types of tools, they don't need to; their sharp mouthparts, formed from the upper trunk and a trunk-like lower lip, are still very much sufficient to tear and chew their food, as well as to defend themselves against many enemies.

The species is extremely social, for it relies on cooperation with all others of its kind to protect many acres of this shared farmland from competitors who would steal their food; at some point, these trunkos learned that it is much better to share a little food with a neighbor than for everyone to lose all of their food to a single rummaging predator, and so they work together. Though each individual farmackle is only around the size of a human being, when they work in groups - and these groups may number several hundred, all sharing one large farm plot of perhaps 400 small, dug-out ponds - they can intimidate most predatory animals and drive them away from the farm before they cause much damage. The bare facial skin of the farmackle is bright red and white in both sexes, a stark change from the muddy appearance of the hookjaw, and this vibrant pattern helps the animals to communicate non-verbally with their partners with gestures at a distance.

The primary diet of the farmackle is a large, carp-like mollyminnow which has become truly domesticated over millions of years and no longer occurs in its natural color. Most commonly now it is orange, though other hues may be selected purely on an ornamental value, including white and even blue. This fish is larger and gains weight faster than its wild form. Farmackles feed their ponds with floating mats of algae which may be collected from nearby wild ponds when necessary, but which are normally cultivated for this purpose within net cages in the center of the fish ponds where the large adult fish cannot reach them, but the fry can shelter in the vegetation from the adult's hungry mouths, while also feeding on insect larvae that inevitably are abundant within the vegetation. As the plants overgrow their space, portions are hauled out and fed to the larger fish. The result is an efficient and nearly closed system in which the algae remove the fishes' waste products from the water and use it to grow, feeding the fish and keeping their environment clean. Over the many eons that these birds and their ancestors have been perfecting their agriculture, they have also added several types of plants to their diets which would initially appear as wild opportunistic weeds growing in the ponds or at their margins. Some of these are grasses with edible root tubers or large seeds; over time, they too have changed from their predecessors as the farmackles favored those with the largest edible portions and pulled those which were not worth eating. These have become secondary crops, which also help keep the ponds clean and reduce nitrogen build up in the water; though the farmackle must eat meat to survive, up to 25% of its diet may now be made up of these cultivated plants.

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There is a bias for human eyes to take the most notice of the largest creatures, and to sometimes overlook the smaller. But of course the upperglades are host to a very wide range of small birds as well. Snifflers are the smallest trunkos, and the littlest of all rhyncheirids since the extinction of mid-Ultimocene boras, and some live here, too. They are the most predatory trunkos, most species being hypercarnivores which feed frequently to sustain rapid metabolisms. They are fast runners and usually stick to thick cover, never too far from a hiding place, as they are vulnerable to many enemies due to their tiny stature. In the late hothouse, many forms of snifflers have appeared which weigh less than half a pound. The smallest clade of snifflers has a north polar origin, and have evolved from the sogstepper. Many species across several closely related genera have diverged from this ancestor since. They are ancestrally associated with shoreline environments, and include the seaskipper of the polar basin, which spends much of its time walking on floating vegetation. But also among this clade is the skyskipper, an alpine species adapted to the sky islands, and which does not live near water at all.

Though it is not the ancestor of either of those species, the sniffsnatch is a generalized example of its clade which makes its home across the upperglade wetlands, favoring damp, dark places. It is a sister species to the skyskipper, and like it, it is not always found immediately nearby water, but it does not venture too far from it, either, and so is absent on the drier southern plains. It is crepuscular when possible, and like its cousin, has evolved long feeler-like plumes on its face to help it find its way around in low light conditions. Nonetheless, it adapts to seasonal day length and will hunt if necessary in both day and night, chasing insects and snatching them up in its trunk. They hunt along well-worn game trails that they gradually make through the undergrowth of a well-defended territory. Both this species and the skyskipper have evolved small hooks on their trunks which they use to wrestle with prey and restrain it, killing it with a razor-sharp pincer-like beak, but they are larger in this animal which routinely tackles not just insects, but occasionally vertebrate victims almost as big as itself. Sniffsnatches are small, weighing just four ounces, but they are fierce and extremely fast, outmaneuvering even rather large prey and getting it from a vulnerable position to kill it, often in a matter of seconds. In addition to all manners of arthropods, they readily target skuzzards, seedsnatcher molodonts, and even ground-dwelling sparrowgulls like mowerbirds. Adults are also extremely territorial, in dramatic contrast to their nearest relatives, and live strictly in mated pairs which viciously attack intruders and which will cannibalize them if food is scarce. Though parental care is well-developed, chicks are weaned quickly and driven out of the territory by their parents as soon as they are independent; broods are produced several times per year, and each chick may be less valuable to the parents than is typical for trunkos as a result, since each one can be hatched and raised in only a couple of months with far less expenditure of energy than large trunkos require.

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Even the smallest trunkos are far from being the littlest birds. The upperglades supports hundreds of unique species of small, flying birds, across many clades - verminfans, sparrowgulls, and archangels among them. But here, as elsewhere, the skewers have produced especially intriguing forms. Tuftlets are nectar-feeding linialinguids, a sister branch to the will-o-wisp which specialized their branching tongues to drink flower nectar, now their primary diet. They are found worldwide, favoring open forests, jungle canopies, and the edges of woodlands where flowers are most common. The extensible tongue of these birds branches far down its length into a cluster of very fine, fractal fibers that collectively resemble a brush, and which are used to soak up fluid and transfer it to the mouth. Despite a delicate appearance, the tongue is still used to capture supplementary insect prey which is also visiting the flowers it visits; the many hair-like strands at the end of the tongue are moveable, and resemble the tentacles of a jellyfish as they engulf small insects before the bird sucks the entire organ back into its throat and drops them down its gullet for digestion. 

Lyretail tuftlets of northern Serinarcta's wooded wetlands are a species that has further put their tongue to an additional use. In this species, it serves as a sensory organ, combining scent and taste, and being especially useful for the male to detect the presence of female pheromones released when they are receptive to mate. This species is sexually dimorphic, the male being ornamented with long plumes around its face and two arching, elongated tail feathers as well as iridescent blue highlights to its brown feathers - females are entirely mottled brown and gray, to avoid predators. A crepuscular species, most active in two daily periods around dawn and dusk, during mating season males leave their roosts in the bark of trees and seek out hidden females by their scent cues that linger in the air and collect on their brush-like tongues. When they find one, they display to her with an acrobatic dance, fanning their tails and extending the four clusters of plumes around their faces, which hit the low morning light at just the right angle to light up and shimmer with changing flashes of color. If she is impressed, she will permit him to mount her, a fleeting affair over in seconds, and he will go on his way to court the next female he finds.  

Reproduction is very primitive in the tuftlets, unchanged from earlier butterbird ancestors, and larvae feed on tree sap with their sharp upper mandibles. Tuftlets do often perform one added step - the female usually deposits her eggs above the ground in tree twigs, to help protect them from soil-borne predators, as well as flooding, before they are hatched out and mobile.  She will lay a clutch of several hundred minute, fertilized eggs into the soft, green wood of first year tree branches, cutting small incisions with her beak. When the tiny larval offspring hatch, they drop to the forest floor and burrow into the soil, where they remain for the next several years of their lives. Adults are short-lived, usually surviving for only one or two years, with females typically outliving males, as they expend less energy.

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There are always weirder birds, though, and avimanders, the nearest relatives of the skuorcs, are certainly strange. Saladmanders, a group of plant-eating avimanders with large, flat bills, have experienced a boom of success in northern Serinarcta late in the hothouse, where vast freshwater habitats still remain abundant. In particular these boreal regions, thanks to their long summer daylight, support especially productive wetlands choked with green vegetation. And this abundance of food has led some saladmanders toward relatively huge sizes.

Saladgators are one such descendant genus which thrive throughout the polar basin and northern upperglades. Growing up to five feet long, these animals exhibit very wide, blunt bills used to plow down water plants, filter food from the sand, and skim floating algae from the surface. Their mouth angle upwards at all times, lending them a smiling expression for which their genus is named. Saladgators, like their earlier ancestors, are primarily plant eaters and gorge themselves throughout the brief but flourishing summer season. With large webbed feet and a robust eel-like tail they glide smoothly through the water, usually along the bottom, using single-clawed forearms like picks in the substrate to help steady them as they go. Though not specifically social, saladgators can be so numerous in these wetlands that they form loose herds purely through their abundance - they are very frequently preyed upon by such large predators as the arctic snagglejaw in the north of their range, as their preference for shallow shoreline waters puts them directly in the line of those hunters' ambush. 

To offset high predation mortality at all life stages, saladgators reproduce quickly, lay vast numbers of eggs, and reach adulthood remarkably fast. Females lay their eggs in hidden burrows they dig out into shorelines with their beaks and claws, depositing them in clutches of up to 10,000. Males seek to be noticed by egg-laying females by loudly clattering their bills outside her burrow; the biggest males make the loudest noises, and these are the female's preference; she selects her choice, and he then aggressively deters the entry of any other, being the only one to fertilize the clutch. Size is important to the mother, because after she lays her eggs she departs - it is up to her chosen mate to defend until their young hatch, and the stronger he is, the better he can do it. The male is a good father, and even dutifully transports his newborns in his bill once they begin to hatch, taking them to suitably vegetated shallows before leaving them to their fates. Larvae begin life scarcely a centimeter long, but feed so aggressively on algae and tiny invertebrates that by the end of their first summer the few which survive the innumerable enemies they face in their first weeks and months can be a foot long. They may then reach four feet by their second year, and be sexually mature at the start of their third. All life stages survive the longdark winter, when plant life dies out, by hibernating; juveniles simply bury themselves down in the mud, while larger adults utilize similar shoreline burrows to those used to shelter egg clutches. Large saladgator hibernaculums can extend 40 feet into a riverbank, and the animal then closes off the entrance with mud to hide from enemies as it enters a state of torpor, aided by the coolness of the deep earth. Just how it knows when spring returns, so far below ground, with no visual cues to go by is not entirely certain, but the likeliest explanation is that like many migratory birds, the saladgator senses slight changes in the moon's magnetic field which coincide with its seasonal rotation, and so begin to stir and leave their burrows in the spring once plants have begun to re-emerge from dormancy. 

The falsejaw snatchsnake, a descendant of the streamspear, is found in the upperglades wetlands too. This avimander has evolved its two forelegs into - effectively - two new pairs of jaws. They angle forward on either side of the small head, and when prey, like a small fish, a lumpus, or a large insect is detected by long whisker-like hairs on the tips of the "jaws", it lunges forward, closing them mantis-like around its victim in an inescapable death grip. The closing motion of these psuedo-mouthparts can exert in excess of 50 lbs of force, making escape impossible even for prey larger than this hunter. The snatchsnake is also venomous, and while its victims struggle in its grasp, it delivers a virulent cocktail of neurotoxins with its true jaws to incapacitate its prey in about two minutes. An ambush predator, the falsejaw snatchsnake spends much of its time lying motionless, clinging to submersed vegetation, sometimes for several days at a time.

Unlike the stagnant waters of the soglands, the upperglades is well-oxygenated, for the waters are not still swamps as much as wide, slowly-moving rivers meandering their way to their final drainage in the polar basin. The water movement brings new oxygen, and so the snatchsnake can still respire with its skin "hairs" around limbs and jaws, though in emergencies it can also gasp at the surface and absorb oxygen into the lining of its stomach. Elongated and serpent-like with only small limbs, snatchsnakes rarely venture on land, but can do so in wet, flooded conditions to reach new habitat. The falsejaw snatchsnake is highly cannibalistic, and this is also an inevitable part of its courtship - males are grabbed by the female as they come to fertilize the small clutches of eggs she lays, and eaten shortly after the fact. This sacrifice is necessary for her survival, as she will carry her eggs beneath her hind legs for three weeks before they hatch into small but fully independent versions of the adult, and during this time she will hide away in a dark, quiet place to avoid her own enemies, at the expense of her ability to feed. By having the male's carcass as a meal beforehand, she can both endure her fasting period and recover what energy she has lost in laying her clutch. Because of this system, males are only around one-third as long as females and live less than one year, while females are long lived.