The Weird and Wonderful Life of Zarreland
An island cut off from the mainland for just five million years has come to host some of Serina's most incredible thorngrazers, along with other intriguing and insular examples of evolution in isolation.
290 million years PE, crested thorngrazers thrive across the northern world. Far removed from ugly, brutish predecessors, this clade now includes some of the most beautiful animals ever to live upon Serina. Horns-of-Paradise are a group of extremely decorated crested loopalopes native to the heavily forested jungle island of Zarreland off the southern coast of Serinarcta, where their ancestors - animals similar to the blue-hooped loopalope, but with simpler horns - were isolated 5 million years ago. Zarreland, an island about 1.5 times the area of New Zealand, was separated from the mainland when the coastal, tidally-flooded bridge of land connecting them washed away permanently, leaving several endemic herbivores which had happened to reach this refuge alone to evolve in the absence of traditional land predators. Without ground hunters such as sawjaws, the horns of paradise lost the horizontal horizon-scanning pupils characteristic of thorngrazers. Sexual selection in combination with reduced predatory pressure has led this group of animals to become incredibly varied and diverse; eight species now live on the island. Some sport long curling horns, others inflatable air sacs. Some have big membranes of colorful skin, and others tufts of bristly hair. No two horn of paradise species are alike.
In addition to a tuft of long yellow quills on its head, the dazzling flaghorn's outward-curling horns support two membranes of brilliantly blue skin that flutter behind it as it runs like the wings of a butterfly. Several species of horn of paradise, including this one, have evolved iridescent hair that shimmers and seems to glow as it reflects and refracts dappled sunlight that streams through the trees to the shaded forest floor. This is one of the best singers in its group, its swollen, colorful sinuses connected to lightly twisted crests that produce very musical, flute-like melody which is beautiful in solitude, but ethereal in number. As males gather in leks and display together to attract a mate, they whistle through their hollow head ornaments in an eerie chorus, and the forests of Zarreland come alive with otherworldly flute music. Females are brown and plain, vanishing easily into the dark depths of the forest, appearing occasionally to observe choruses of calling males and unobtrusively gesture to a chosen partner to join her in the shadows to couple. As in nearly all thorngrazers, the male plays no further role in parenthood.
above: a recording of a chorus of several male dazzling flaghorns singing in the early morning hours deep in the interior forest of Zarreland.
Sticking to more open, sunlit glades on the island of Zarreland is one of the most extraordinary of the flaghorn thorngrazers, the sensational sailgoat. The male of this remarkable animal has one of the most extreme display structures of any creature: two huge sails of skin which stretch from its arcing crests all the way down to the ankle of its hind limb. Unlike its close relative, the dazzling flaghorn, the hollow crests of this species extend out into this skin membrane, which is full of inflatable air sacs. This allows the sailgoat to literally pump up its sail with air and extend it massively, so that from in front, it resembles a gigantic pink heart. This is done with rapid mouth breathing, which pushes air up into the sinus and through the crests. A valve in the sinus seals between breaths, keeping the air from escaping and increasing the pressure in the crest so air is expelled into the membrane. The entire inflation process takes less then a minute, and usually occurs when the male sights a female that he wishes to court - like all Zarreland thorngrazers, she is small and drab, lacking even a small trace of his decoration.
The courtship dance involves opening the nostrils in shot intervals to release a small amount of the stored air with a loud call very much like a party horn; the male then inflates his sails to full size again, and repeats until the female is seduced - or until she simply leaves, unimpressed. This species favors sunnier places than the dazzling flaghorns, and males strut most in the morning hours when they can align their sails to hit the sharp angles of the sun head-on, which shine through them and increase the color contrast as the hollow air sacs glow with the back lighting as the solid skin membrane between them remains darker.
All of the flaghorns are close relatives to each other, despite their wild differences in form. Though sexual selection has transformed each one of them into something unique to stand out from the crowd, these thorngrazers are nonetheless among the most likely to interbreed with one another, and hybrids between most are fertile. Though not especially common, hybridization is not rare, either, and the fact that most females are very similar to one another means that males likely cannot distinguish their own species on sight, and so will court any they come across. It is usually the female's choice to accept a mate or not, though, and so just why one might choose a partner of the wrong species is not immediately obvious. Perhaps there is some benefit to adding an influx of very different genes to her lineage, that may convey some increased fitness or immunity. In some cases hybrid animals do poorly because they inherit a muddied mix of different mechanisms of escaping predators, which leaves them less likely to survive than either parent species. But on Zarreland, flaghorns have no predators as adults, and this may not be a factor in the survival of these hybrids. Hybrid individuals can eventually lead to the formation of new species if they more often mate with other hybrids than with other pure species.
Though the male of each and every horn of paradise is uniquely exaggerated - an example of runaway sexual selection without predation pressures to curb it - the largest thorngrazer of Zarreland is one of the most dramatically ornamented of all. King horns of paradise are appropriately named; these animals are far larger than all other species, weighing more than 300 pounds, and standing almost five foot at the shoulder. The headgear of the male adds another two feet, and though the horns are simple arcs with only a moderate skin membrane relative to many relatives, the king horn of paradise makes up for it with its extremely complex pattern, a dazzling display of black, white, red, blue, green and gold, which is framed by more than twenty-odd long, trailing bristles which originate from around its sinuses and dangle from the tips of its crests. These are not hair, but an extraordinary exaptation of the dermal armor which was widespread in earlier thorngrazers, but is now usually only found below the skin in loopalopes. These bristles are teeth, albeit exceptionally elongated ones, which are so narrow that they flex like wire as the male struts and shakes its head in its mesmerizing mating dance. Males grow them and shed them throughout the year as they are prone to snap off after a short time, and there is only a short window each summer when all of them are likely to be intact, which is when the males do most of their courtship.
Males seek out females, rather than the inverse, and when they find them, they try to dazzle them with rapid side to side movements that swirl their patterns into a mass of stimuli which can momentarilly overwhelm the female and send her into a trance-like state. Getting nearer and nearer as he speeds up his dance, he tries to get near enough to mount her and mate with her, without waiting for her approval. It is a strange, somewhat sinister method of courtship, and one which has evolved from a system in which the female typically has full choice in which males she selects. At some point, the displays selected for by females over thousands of generations became so complicated that the male was able to adapt its behavior and utilize them aggressively to achieve greater reproductive success.
Female king horns of paradise are not merely at the whim of aggressive males, however. They are social, while males are solitary, and rely on other females to defend themselves against unwanted male attention. It is hard to dazzle multiple females at once, and when confronted by a male, several females will group closely together and if they are uninterested, they very effectively block the male's advances with aggressive kicks and bites each time he tries to get too close to any one of them. It is a fascinating example of conflict within a single species spurring novel innovations, as aggressive males seek to reproduce at any cost, and so the females learn ways to defend themselves and avoid unwanted interactions with mates they would not choose. Among all the crested thorngrazers of Zarreland, this is the only one with this sort of interaction. It may not be surprising, then, that the king horn of paradise is not as closely related to all of the other species as they are to each other; it is the only species in its genus, and it does not share the same common ancestor, but rather diverged nearly three million years before Zarreland was formed. Horns of paradise are polyphyletic; the same isolation and lack of predation has allowed two unrelated groups to evolve along similar lines, developing lavish display. Flaghorns - a true clade - and the king horn of paradise descend from two different loopalopes, both of which were marooned on the island when its connection to the mainland was flooded. As such, they are not behaviorally similar, and they cannot interbreed. Yet their crests and displays are all so similarly wild and extraordinary, that they are all deserving of their shared titles. They are truly among Serina's most paradisaical creatures.
Upon this isolated island world of the most incredibly ornamented thorngrazers on Serina, one stands out for not standing out. The brown bullhorn is a flaghorn that more closely resembles a unicorn or a skybex than a horn of paradise, for it has no bright colors, and no large display structures. Yet this animal is no more closely related to a unicorn than is any other loopalope; the brown bullhorn is remarkable for having lost its ancestor's grandiose decorations secondarily. The reason is straightforward - Zarreland has no large terrestrial carnivores. All other horns of paradise live in lowland forests - except the very biggest, which lives in wetlands - and as such, as adults they are all but totally protected from the only carnivores on Zarreland which can threaten them - flying birds (and tribbats - the boggart being a rare exception for its ability to enter jungles and catch the youngest flaghorns.) But the brown bullhorn is endemic to a very different habitat: Zarreland's singular, isolated sky island. Though this biological mountain is small by global standards, peaking at just over 1/3 of a mile in height, it nonetheless surpasses the forest canopy around it by a great deal - all the more so, since Zarreland is otherwise extremely flat and much of it sits near sea level. Like most sky islands, its sides are steep cliffs, while its canopy comprises a short, lush forest of ant trees. With hardly any competitors for food there, it is an appealing place for a flaghorn to be. So the brown bullhorn has become a swift, tip-toeing rock climber with agility rivaling any mainland thorngrazer. But as it bounds from cliff to cliff, moving between patches of the pinnacle forest, it is very vulnerable to lurking avian predators. As such, it has completely lost all of its relatives' vibrant color and large display structures, reverting to a neutral pattern of brown and black which blends in against the cliffs.
The brown bullhorn is a true flaghorn, despite its looks. Though among the tiniest horns of paradise, it is most closely related to the far larger and still-ornamented blue bullhorn of the lowland forest, and both species show a somewhat differentiated crest anatomy from the rest of their clade. The brown bullhorn has no skin membranes around its crest, and in the blue bullhorn they are small. Instead, this genus has concentrated on growing wider, shorter disc-like crests. In blue bullhorns, the expanded, dish-like nostril openings are colorful, and visual display still accompanies a very low, amplified call. In brown bullhorns the color has been lost and vocalization is now the sole manner of attaining mates and communicating with conspecifics. Their crests resemble an additional set of paired ears on top of the head, and from them the males emit low, bass melodies. They have an unusual calling posture in which they lean their heads close against the rock; their horns can be rotated several degrees left and right with muscles at their base, and lack true bony elements, being unossified cartilage. They can thus press their nostrils tight against hard surfaces, and in doing so send their vibrations through them. Displaying males also choose alcoves in the cliff which help to further amplify their sound and ensure it travels far along the surface of the mountain as infrasound. The very low-pitched call is unique for not carrying far in air, which helps to hide its maker from flying predators. Male brown bullhorns also still have "fang" teeth around the mouth, small tusks lost in most flaghorns, which they use to fight with other males over females.
Bullhorns further have adapted to their unique environment in becoming mainly nocturnal, since their enemies are day-flying and they no longer need to see bright color to communicate. By day they retreat into caves in the cliff or into thickets at its peak, coming out at dusk to feed and court mates.
The blue bullhorn is the sister species to the brown bullhorn. Together, these two species form their own clade among flaghorns and diverged immediately after the group reached the island. This species has changed less from the ancestral bullhorn than has the brown species, and still has colorful crests. This is not to say it hasn't changed at all - this horn of paradise has increased in size, directly contrasting its nearest relative, and now rivals the bannerbuck as Zarreland's second biggest thorngrazer. It has also evolved more prominent tusks from the small fangs of their ancestor, indicating fiercer temperament. And it is true - blue bullhorns are probably the island's most aggressive flaghorn, and the one most strongly adapted to physical fighting. Both bullhorns have "soft" crests that are not ossified, which can be flexed somewhat like reverse ears to send calls in different directions; this also leaves them more resistant to damage as they can bend insead of break when struck, and so means that males of this species do not have to limit their conflicts to displays, but can actually battle one another over territory and mating opportunity. And so they do - contests are rarely harmful to either opponent, but can last several hours and involve shoving and head-hitting, usually done from the side so that the tusks and brow horns can be knocked together. An additional small horn is present below the eye, on the cheek, and serves as a shield to deflect horn strikes from the eye. Like all thorngrazers, these hard horns are actually external dermal teeth, a feature rare among Zarreland's species, but one that is not too hard to regain as all species still develop such armor as small nodules below their skin.
While most flaghorns favor thick jungle, this is not true for either bullhorn. And though the blue bullhorn is still closer tied to forest than the brown, it is most often observed along the tree line along clearings, where it likes to leave cover and graze in the open, eating more grasses than other species. Its size protects it from endemic enemies, but for this habit it is the most likely of the flaghorns to fall prey to the passager hellican if it chooses a beach-side opening in which to venture. Though this thorngrazer is less colorful than most flaghorns, this is not due to predation fear: it is simply a trade-off away from visual display toward more physical activity, and females rely less on the vibrance of a male and more on his performance in contest with other males to determine his suitability as a mate. The large crests of this species give it the loudest call among the island's animals, but also one of the simplest, resembling a foghorn.
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The twirling curloop is an important horn of paradise, for it is the most basal of them all, and serves as a rare evolutionary link that clearly connects two disparate groups of animals, the mainland loopalopes (from which all horns of paradise arose) and the flaghorns themselves. It is the only thorngrazer still classified within the genus Circoronus upon Zarreland. All flaghorns evolved from this genus, that of the other loopalopes, but most are now are placed in other genera as a result of their more extreme behavioral and morphological changes (to be pedantic, other flaghorns could be considered subgenera of this genus.)
Twirling curloops more closely resemble their close continental relatives such as the blue-hooped loopalope than do any of the other insular species. There are still similarities of pattern and crest structure, but time has still changed these animals. They share in common with the more derived loopalopes larger eyes, as they are animals of forest undergrowth rather than the open plains their ancestors lived upon, and pupils that are box-shaped, not quite rounded yet, but no longer as rectangular as in their ancestors. They also have the larger heads and slightly shorter legs of other flaghorns, the result of selection for bigger display structures and less need for agility when running. The crest structure is more complex than in the blue-hooped loopalope and is larger and more tightly intertwined, and this is the only horn of paradise which has retained looping, interwoven crests after their isolation upon the island. Like the other flaghorns, twirling curloops have evolved a larger patagium of colorful skin that connects the back of each crest to the muscles of their back - this is the trait which gives all of them their common name. Fur coloration is intermediate between the pale-haired mainland loopalopes and darker island species such as the dazzling flaghorn, giving some indication how those animals evolved from a brown, striped ancestor. Its calls are also somewhat in-between the simplistic trumpeting of its ancestor group and the more complicated songs of its contemporary island relatives, consisting of a pleasant, if repetitive warble. As in most crested thorngrazers, females are dull-colored with short, simple crests.
The twirling curloop is the most gregarious flaghorn and lives in herds of twenty to fifty, sometimes more, which do most of their foraging along forest edges where a rich variety of vegetation of both forest and clearing habitats grow together. There is safety in numbers - most flaghorns live alone or travel in small bands, because there are no predators deep in the forest where they live. Curloops are more vulnerable to enemies like the tigercrow when they enter clearings, and so they still adopt a system of sentries who watch over the rest of the herd as they graze, in common with many mainland crested thorngrazers. Always remaining close to the forest edge, when danger threatens the herd can quickly dash into thick cover where their flying pursuer cannot follow. Males remain in herds with females and with one another year-round; there is no set breeding season, and they do not compete aggressively, but rather display visually when females are receptive to breed so that she can compare them and pick the one which is best ornamented. Unlike many animals, female twirling curloops demonstrate a preference for variety in the male's crest structure, and will prefer a different looking partner to the one she mated with last, as it is a clear signal of genetic diversity. This has led to the most varied range of male crest shapes of any flaghorn, and crests range in complexity, width, height, and color. A significant percentage are even asymmetrical, arcing in different directions - these are minor deformities which would be weeded out in most species, but which persist here thanks to the female's appreciation for the uncommon and the different.
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The bannerbuck is one of the largest flaghorns, and with the male's remarkably narrow, vertical crest, it can stand ten feet tall. The bannerbuck has some of the more derived cranial anatomy of the flaghorn family; two additional hollow crests are present on the forehead and derived from the lower sinuses, while the tips of the two primary crests are enlarged and disc-like, similar to the unrelated unicorns, to amplify loud calls which sound like the jingling of many bells. Bannerbucks are one of a few flaghorns which can rapidly contract or expand pigment cells in their crest tissue to produce nearly instant color changes, a trait they share with some other tribbets, primarily certain poppits like signalopes, but also some tribbats. For the male bannerbuck, this means that its crest can flicker like a flame, with hypnotic streaks of color ranging from blue to violet to red and gold - it rarely expresses green, however, perhaps as this hue is less visible in the vegetated environments it favors. Unlike other flaghorns, bannerbucks can use this control of their color to fade their crest when not actively courting or engaging in conflict with another bannerbuck; when feeding or otherwise not wishing to draw attention to itself, the crest dulls to a dark gray.
The bannerbuck is an inhabitant of the wetter swamp forests of the island, and so has wide-splayed hooves to walk over soft and unstable terrain. Like all horns of paradise, it is a browser, but also feeds on water plants, even those several feet below water; like all thorngrazers, it is dense and does not float well - it can, however, store a large amount of air in its crest, and even can use its crest as a snorkel, letting it walk on the bottom of rivers and marshes and graze there on aquatic vegetation. Like all crested thorngrazers, a fleshy valve exists at the end of each sinus to seal it off when necessary, keeping it from filling with water when it dives - or when it simply rains. Further, all large-horned thorngrazers have powerful sneezing reflexes with which they can quickly clear their crests, usually lowering them at an angle to facilitate the easy spilling of accumulated water; they may even intentionally allow water to trickle through their sinuses in order to clean them, expelling the water with all its collected debris shortly after. Though the female's crest is not colorful as the male's, it is still well-developed, albeit around half the height, and so both sexes can use them to reach underwater food sources, though males can do so to a greater extent than females.
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The final horn of paradise of Zarreland is the triumphant trumpeter, a relatively large horn of paradise, the fourth tallest on the island, and one of the most decorated of all. It is the only other member of the Rectusignus genus, which it shares with the bannerbuck. Like that animal, this one can also shift the color patterns in its sails in a matter of seconds by retracting or expanding chromatophores in its skin, but its sails are smaller, particularly between its horns. Like bannerbucks, trumpeters also have secondary sinus crests but they are more developed, and arc back from their foreheads around their primary crests, just above the eyes. In mature males, these crests pierce through the sails on the sides of the neck, producing a small, permanent hole in the membrane. The reason for this is unclear, but as it does not seem to hinder the animal in any way, it may simply be an unintended consequence of rapid, runaway evolution of sexual signals in the absence of other selective pressure.
The crests of the trumpeter are mostly bright yellow (fading to light blue at their tips), the only thorngrazer to have them predominately this color on the island. The primary crests angle backward and open up with large discs, resembling a trumpet, and the animal's calls are a slightly melodic series of highly resonant honks, a song which is comparable to a deeper, slower version of the rapid, bell-like jingling of the bannerbuck.
This flaghorn alone has also evolved a display of tail plumes - long, iridescent quills of hair that are each attached to a small pilloerector muscle, letting the trumpeter independently rotate and flick them at will. Males display by throwing their heads back and shaking their plumage while calling, flashing their sails repeatedly from violet to red to yellow in a shimmering pattern. Males are normally solitary, while females are social and live in small groups, feeding on undergrowth vegetation in the lowland jungles of the island. Groups of females synchronize their breeding cycles, however, so that periodically they all seek to find partners. To do that that, they find a suitable forest clearing, and using crests - which though not colorful, are almost as large as the male's - they begin to call from the edges in harmony, a synchronized serenade that is louder the more females are involved. No other thorngrazer exhibits a reversed courtship such as this, but both species of this genus have crested females - bannerbucks use them as a snorkel, and this may be the ancestral behavior, so that female trumpeters have now found a new use for crests they already had and once used more practically.
Males respond to the calls and search them out from all around the forest, collecting in the clearing while the females stand in the shadows and watch as their suitors stakes out a small radius around itself as a temporary territory and begin to display. Soon all of the males are shaking their iridescent pelage in the sunlight and putting on their brightest colors as they sing their honking melodies. Up to twenty males may arrive together, outnumbering most female groups, and this allows them to call upon potential mates to show up so that they can quickly judge each one's performance, while not risking themselves traveling long distances as they would if they sought out the males wherever they chose to display, which would put them at greater risk of predators. Most, if not all, of the females will ultimately select the same male - their preferences are precise, and they favor the brightest colors, longest plumes, and loudest calls. That's all the better, for their method of selecting a mate attracts predators that cull many of the less desired males. Hunters, mainly tigercrows, quickly hone in on the displaying males as they leave the forest's safety and enter the clearing, and they strike and kill many of the smaller, weaker ones which are forced furthest into the center by more intimidating rival males which seek to stay as close to the females at the treeline as possible.
Though it happens indirectly from the female's behavior, the ultimate effect is that each mating season, most of the males are killed off except for the very fittest and most attractive, which has led to this species evolving more rapidly than any other thorngrazer on Zarreland; it split from the bannerbuck only 400,000 years ago. The now very different appearance and behavior of the species is all directly related to how short-lived the males are, and how specific the female's preferences are, leading to a situation that has similarities to the selective breeding of domesticated animals at a rate faster than natural evolution. Like many breeds of such animals, triumphant trumpeters have very low genetic diversity and are on the whole extremely closely related to each other. In some seasons, a single male will sire up to 90% of the offspring born. Though this has allowed for extremely fast visual changes in the animal, it has also resulted in reduced fitness as far as immunity to disease. For now, this is not a problem - all of the flaghorns live on an isolated island, and don't interact with novel illnesses. But if ever they were to come across a new pathogen, the trumpeter - beautiful, but now genetically weak as a result of its life history - would likely fare the worst.
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While horns of paradise were marooned on Zarreland as the island was detached from Serinarcta's continent, other species were able to choose to live here. Flying species, both tribbethere and avian, are extremely abundant on the island - among them, aukvultures and their relatives are especially well-represented, but in very different forms than the giant species common on the mainland.
Toucrows are small fruit-eating aukvultures which evolved in Serinaustra but are now found worldwide. They are highly arboreal, with toes and fingers well-adapted to grasp. Most species still fly, some very strongly - powerfully enough to sometimes get lost overseas and fly to isolated island regions. Such is the origin of the toumarins of Zarreland, a group of insular toucrows which evolved quickly to fill the niches of the primate-like molmos or scamps of mainland forests, losing much of their flight capacity in the process with few predators to threaten them. Some fifteen endemic species now live here, ranging from as small as a pound to around 40 lbs in weight. Almost of them are tree-dwelling omnivores with a preference for fruit, with a couple of outliers with more specialized diets, and one species that is substantially more terrestrial than the rest.
The toumarins are notable for the strong sexual dimorphism they have evolved to show, with males being much more brightly marked than females, changes related to the relative abundance of food with little danger on their island, so that females do not need males to help raise chicks and males can instead focus all their energy on attracting as many mates as possible. Toumarins can no longer fly, as they don't need to, but most species still have wing feathers that are long enough to flutter with and increase their jump distances. They have lost their tail fans, which once aided in steering and braking, but two ornamental feathers remain in the male twintail toumarin, which are paddle-like and iridescent and used in courtship display. Males of this small lemur-like animal form leks to attract mates in which as many as a hundred will each pick a perch in a sunlit patch of the canopy and flash their feathers, accompanying their dances with loud cackling calls as more cryptically-colored females come from all around to view their options from within the foliage. Coupling is brief and the female departs immediately after, to tend to her small brood of just two young alone in another month or so after they are born in a small, cup-like nest made from sticks and moss, and lined with feathers from her own breast. Her chicks can climb with competence in just a week's time, and from then on leave the nest, clinging to their mother, where they are safer from nest-raiding predators.
Twintail toumarins feed heavily on berries but also hunt, taking insects and occasionally even smaller birds, mostly metamorph larvae that they find digging through soft, rotting wood; by doing this, toucrows like this also fill the roles of other birds absent here - taptrackers, which are otherwise widespread, but have no native species here. Twintail toumarins are small enough, at just 22 ounces, to also drink nectar from forest flowers and serve as a small-scale pollinator, though they live in small home ranges and so don't disperse the pollen very far versus flying birds.
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The titan toumarin of Zarreland, at 9 feet high and 250 lbs, is the largest toucrow in the world, and a massive contrast to the twintail it coexists alongside. Among archangels on the whole this is just about middle of the road, if not on the small side, but most toucrows are little, adapted to eat fruit and a small amount of animal matter. The titan toumarin, though, has evolved upon an insular habitat with relatively few competitors and only one significant predator, the tigercrow. Abundant food, and the threat of this enemy, has led this species to gigantism. The bigger it became the less vulnerable it was, and the more efficiently it could digest an herbivorous diet now composed mostly of leaves.
Titan toumarins are now ground-dwelling, and the adults are flightless; juveniles are weak fliers which can flutter short distances. This puts them effectively out of reach of the tiger crow, an arboreal predator that avoids the ground. They are solitary, wandering quietly through the island's densest interior jungles and browsing vegetation, and though their size limits their climbing ability, with their grasping forearms they can still ascend trees a short distance above the ground, which they may do to reach fruit. Males attract mates with rattling calls, not melodic but very loud at a distance, usually at dusk. These noises are non-verbal, in fact being produced by rapidly knocking their bills on tree trunks, producing a resonant sound in a hollow space within their beak casques. Titan toumarins are otherwise almost mute, their voices quiet, hoarse, and strained like quiet coughing. Males may form small leks to call within so as their smaller relatives still do, though many call entirely alone. When a female is nearby, they begin flashing the white feathers on their wingtips in a fluttering display that is accompanied by shaking their necks, which are covered in iridescent feathers, and loudly clacking their boldly-marked black and yellow bills together (unlike smaller toumarins, titans have no long display feathers on their tails.) They are not aggressive, and mate choice is always up to the female, who is slightly larger - perhaps to ensure the males do not take advantage of her - and not quite as colorful.
Females which have bred soon make a nest on the ground, stacking moss into a raised heap some 3 feet high, which a prospective mother then sits on top of, forming a cup-like indentation in which she gives birth to a single pupal sac and then raises the single chick on her own. For archangels, her level of parental care is very good - the chick is kept in the nest for three weeks, then becomes strong enough to cling to its mother and is carried for another 6-8 weeks. Even once self-feeding, it remains with her and the two do not depart until it is almost 8 months old and approaching adult size. Such a close watch on her young, safe below the tree canopy, keeps it safe from the tigercrow that is the major enemy of the smaller flying toucrows of the island. Yet these birds have very few defenses against any enemy other than their size, lacking a strong bite, large claws, or even any speed to escape. Occasionally titans need to cross forest clearings or forge rivers, and this is when they are truly in danger; if caught outside cover, the tigercrow can and does successfully ambush them, usually by biting them on the back of the neck.
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Zarreland is an island refuge for life in the late hothouse, an insular habitat lacking the large terrestrial predators of the mainland. Relative safety from such threats has allowed native herbivores such as crownprinces and horns-of-paradise to diversify into extreme forms through runaway sexual selection, growing ever more dramatic horns, crests, songs, and colors to attract a mate. But this jungle island isn't entirely safe for all its members - for not all Zarreland aukvultures are vegetarians.
The tigercrow is the largest carnivore resident on Zarreland. A 140 pound rhynchodon with a 9 foot wingspan, this bird feeds in the forest canopy, swooping in from above and snatching away molmos, chamarmotoos, toumarins, and occasionally brown bullhorns, but the dense canopy of the jungle protects most other horns of paradise from its airborne attacks. These birds are strongly arboreal, and roost as well as nest in trees or cliffs - they don't typically come down to the forest floor, and so usually, those thorngrazers are safe. These aukvultures are well camouflaged with black plumage striped with tan bands, perfect to hide them from sight in thick tree cover and allow them to remain unseen until they choose to strike. They kill prey, as do all aukvultures, with their toothy jaws rather than their talons, though the tigercrow shares a reversed hind toe with the toucrows which is not only useful to grasp branches, but also to reach into the treetops to catch fleeing prey and toss it up to the jaws to be killed while in flight.
Strongly solitary hunters, tigercrows hunt singly and fight if they meet along territorial borders, flashing bright white patches under their wings as a threat. If this is not enough to discourage an intruder, tigercrows will lock beaks and fight, occasionally to the death, though normally the weaker of the two eventually relents and drops down into the forest below to escape. Only once its opponent has left does it quietly climb back to the treetops and quickly fly away. Females are only briefly tolerated by males when mating and then must quickly flee or risk attack; rare among aukvultures, the male takes no part in rearing his young. Infanticide is common, and may be inflicted by both males and other females, both of which will eat chicks of their own species to reduce competition for resources; this may be one of the strongest population limiting factors on the small island where there is limited prey and no larger predator consistently present. Young tigercrows are reared in simple nests, usually on top of broken-off tree trunks, and are dependent on their mother for food for around 6 months. Chicks are independent at only 20% of their adult size and fill different niches than their parent, hunting insects and birds in the forest understory to avoid intraspecies predation, at least until their wingspan grows too wide to easily navigate the thicker vegetation.
Tigercrows are most active in the hours around dawn and dusk, when their patterns best hide them from sight. They sleep during the middle of the day, while they spend the darkest hours of the night calling to defend their territories; both sexes "sing" in this way, producing drawn-out barking calls and shrill screeches.
Horns of paradise are mostly safe from the tiger crow. Adults of these larger animals are, indeed, little threatened by anything which shares their deep forest habitat. This isn't quite so true for their young. By day, when the sun shines through the leaves in dappled patches, all of the young creatures play in a peaceful world with little fear. But each evening, as the sun sets, playtime is done and all seek shelter. Thorngrazer calves now stick like glue to their caring mothers, which are their lifelines, while giraffowl chicks - without attentive parents - must watch out for each other. They hide in thick cover, roosting in large groups arranged in a circular pattern with their eyes facing out to spot approaching danger in all directions. From dusk's terrifying descent until the relief of dawn's first light, the young and small creatures of the island make scarcely a noise, because if they do, the boggart will hear them.
Boggarts evolved from fliers too, but unlike the toumarins, they don't stay in the forest, or even on the island, all of the time. They are things from out beyond the known limits of this island land, which descend into the forest only in the nighttime. They fly in on heavy wing beats in the dark, and drop down into grassy clearings and beaches, from which they stride inland and into to the forest depths to feed. They step silent on tiny hooves that drop only between the dry leaves, so that no-one hears them coming - but they hear everything. Huge ears point and pivot, angling toward the faintest sound in the pitch-black woods: a broken twig, a scurry through the grass, even the snore of a sleeping creature in its burrow. What the ears don't pick up, the nose will, or the wide red eyes which narrow to slits in the light only to spread to collect all traces of planetlight in the dark. They snatch the unwary children of the naive adults and slip away unseen, closing toothy jaws over throats quickly enough that they rarely get time to cry out. Parents and peers only realize the loss when morning light reveals one fewer, by which time the demon of the darkness will have long gone.
The boggart is a tribbat, specifically an unusual species of nocturnal handstander closest related to the emperor seademon, which feeds inland on small land vertebrates instead of marine life. By day these large carnivores, which weigh more than 30 pounds and stand at almost 5 feet, roost communally on sandy beaches and rocky coastlines. They lay on the rocks and sleep, groom one another and affirm social bonds, or bicker over the best resting places with raucous calls, much like other seademons. As the sun sets they start to stir, and just before twilight's end, they begin to take flight one by one, jumping into the air with their strong forelegs and vaulting away, finishing the launch with some rapid flaps of their wide bat-like wings. While other species take off over the seas, they head over land and hunt within the forest, having learned in earlier times that there is abundant prey to be found here, too. They stalk the ground, slipping through even thick undergrowth with ease thanks to their spindly forms and wing membranes that fold up tight and out of the way, and catch prey by surprise. Their jaws are proportionally stronger than other seademons and their bite is vice-like, for they rely on suffocation to quickly immobilize their quarry.
Prey averages 25-50% of the hunter's own weight - a size which can be lifted and carried away easily, and a size range which just so happens to be exactly that of newborn horns of paradise and crownprince chicks, which collectively make up over 90% of the diet. When nesting, boggarts form offshore colonies near the water like other species for protection from their own children's predators. Parents are devoted and highly protective of their young, and each takes turns flying inland each night to catch prey, which they then fly back to their nests. Returning night after night with fresh kills, they dismember and feed their pups countless less fortunate babies so that their own may grow strong. Zarreland's tropical climate and abundant food allows its herbivores to breed year-round, and lacking many adult predators and so living a long time, without this regular culling of most of the young produced by boggarts and others, the island would quickly become overpopulated past its ability to sustain them.
Sexual dimorphism in the boggart is reduced from its ancestors and nearest relatives. Both sexes in this animal are large, not just males, because they must all hunt proportionally big prey. Both also have the large pointed ears generally characteristic of males, the only species in which females share this trait, because the ears aren't just for show but are used to pinpoint sounds while hunting in nearly lightless conditions. Yet while females share many typically male physical traits, male boggarts are behaviorally more like females, and are the most attentive parents of any species. They provide equal childcare to their offspring to their mates, including guarding and foraging for food, and this species is monogamous rather than harem-forming.
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Zarreland is a spectacular insular region best known for its incredibly diverse crested thorngrazers. Those animals here, with few predators, have been able to evolve more dramatic displays of color and form for the purpose of sexual display than any found on the mainland. But the thorngrazers are not alone in this upon this jungle island. The crownprinces, too, have done so. And for the same exact reasons - on Zarreland, there is little that can threaten them once they are grown. So there is no reason, then, not to be showy.
A group of entirely flightless giraffowl, crownprinces are named for the lavish crests of the males which rival the extravagance of the horns of paradise in their wide variety. Though there are even fewer species of crownprince here - only two species. The firecrest has already been seen, but it has another relative here on Zarreland. Though thorngrazers outnumber them by several times, those two lonesome species that do exist here are extremely different in appearance despite all being within a single genus. Horns of paradise have more efficient chewing and digestion than crownprinces, and this is almost certainly why there are fewer of these birds, as the many endemic thorngrazers are simply better at eating the limited availability of food on the island. Yet of the two crownprinces, only the little firecrest directly competes among the thorngrazers as an adult. The other species has taken advantage of their four legs and very long avian necks to bypass their competitors, becoming the largest of the island's land animals by a wide margin as tall browsers - a niche thorngrazers are wholly unable to fill. But the young of both crownprinces are, of course, still born quite small. Even the largest must begin their lives as low-browsers, subject to eating what the thorngrazers pass by, and so even these tallest of birds are not entirely able to evolve out of the thorngrazer's influence. Both crownprinces are thus relatively rare, their own populations negatively correlated with those of thorngrazers in their habitats. Indeed, until comparatively recently, the island supported as many as seven endemic crownprinces, a full five of which are recently extinct - some perhaps less than five thousand years ago - as a result of the rapid diversification of thorngrazers which eat the low-growing food their young need to survive their first few months.
The largest crownprince of all, however, has so far survived. It is the bleeding thorn, reaching a height of 14 feet and a weight of 550 lbs. This species may be fairing best thanks to the great tolerance adult have toward their young, which frequently ride on the backs of their elders, whether or not related, and so can browse out of thorngrazer reach even when the chicks are still very small. Both sexes of this species are almost black in color and mostly featherless, with just a small cape of sparse, shaggy feathers on their shoulders, which feature a flash of white plumage in the mature male. Males feature an especially fierce-looking crest comprised of eight to ten bone-white, eight to ten sharp, narrow spikes which radiate around the head in the approximate shape of a spider. Each spike is tipped with a blood-red keratin sheath, lending its owner the appearance of a vicious predator blood-drenched from a recent kill. But the bleeding thorn is an herbivore, and its appearance is purely for show; the white crest stands out against the dark plumage and the shadows of the forest undergrowth, while the vibrant red in turn stands out against the white, producing a striking double contrast that catches the females' eyes in more ways than one.
Because they are huge by the standards of their island, bleeding thorns have no fear of predators and will freely travel outside the forest - indeed, the males' cumbersome headgear can get caught up in thick branches, meaning most mature males live their lives on the edge of the jungle, often nearby the shore where any smaller creature would be in danger from passing hellicans and other predatory birds.
The male bleeding thorn, though, aggressively pursues and drives off even those largest of enemies, and so is sometimes followed by an entourage of much smaller firecrests and even flaghorns which take advantage of its protection to feed in more open places where the food is good, but normally it is too dangerous to spend time in. Why the bleeding thorn tolerates them is not entirely clear, but it may be that its own natural patience with juveniles of its own species clambering around it is simply extended to any significantly smaller creature - since crownprinces don't directly care for their young, or even recognize them, it is entirely possible that they simply don't distinguish such other species from younger examples of their own kind.
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Wait - hellicans? What sort of horror could that be? Well, the last great bird of Zarreland which will be discussed for now is the only one among this list which is not restricted entirely to this island. Like the boggart, it can travel around, and so is not a permanent resident but more a transient visitor. It is the passager hellican, and it is as frightful as its name may indicate.
Hellicans are large, hunting seraphs with long, robust bills and extensible throat pouches, which are competent terrestrial runners but also excellent long-distance fliers. Descendants of the shoresnatch, they are the largest predatory archangels outside the giant aukvulture clade, and several species in this cosmopolitan genus reach a height of ten feet and can weigh over 300 pounds. Unlike aukvultures, hellicans lack bill serrations and are poorly adapted to dismember large prey. Hellicans compensate by having specialized to swallow their food whole; the two bones comprising the lower bill can flex outward, and in certain species this lets their mouths accommodate prey animals weighing up to 175 pounds. The the skin of the throat is elastic and massively flexible to expand and accommodate these meals as they are slowly passed down into the digestive system. Whole prey is held in the pouch for several hours, gradually sliding into the stomach and being digested from one end, as the stomach is not large enough to fit an entire whole food item of the size the hellican often consumes in one piece. A single large meal can comfortably sustain the hellican for upwards of ten days, and perhaps as long as two weeks.
Some hellicans are now inland hunters, leaving behind their shorebird roots, soaring over the grasslands, and dropping down to pursue prey such as loopalopes. The passager hellican, though, is an island-hopper and is still at home along the same coastlines its ancestors evolved around. These birds are true globe-trotters, rarely spending more than a couple weeks in any one place, and being reliant on island species losing much of their wariness. It descends on small islands, usually lacking endemic predators, and seeks to quickly surprise prey animals which have (perhaps a little too careless) ventured into open areas. It is the largest carnivore which can be found, albeit sporadically, on the island of Zarreland, where it may rarely feed on horns of paradise if it finds them away from the thick cover they usually dwell within (however, this predation is not frequent enough to be a major selective pressure among these animals, as it is most likely to kill old or sick animals which have already been driven out of their forest territories.) Too big to enter dense forests, the passager hellican scouts the surrounding beach of each island it visits for anything it can swallow. Though it is bizzare for its ability to down relatively large animals whole, it will eat anything it comes across, and may also gorge itself on hoards of small prey such as young burdles as they hatch from their nests. Following a "smash and grab" technique of hunting, the hellican typically has only a short window upon landing on an island to fill itself before prey is either locally depleted or flees to inaccessible cover. If it is successful hunting, it remains grounded only long enough to digest its prey, and then moves on. Rendered flightless after a large meal for as long as 8 days, the passager hellican itself depends on the lack of predators on offshore islands to rest and digest without being able to escape into the air. This is a luxury not afforded to mainland species which must always be flight-ready, and so which cannot consume animals quite as large.