Spearrunners

Spearrunners

above: a male great plains spearrunner - the largest of all spearrunners - catches a molodont on the dry southern grasslands of Late Pangeacene Serina.

Spearrunners are large carnivorous serezelles found over much of the tropical and subtropical regions of the supercontinent in the late Pangeacene, but particularly the vast, warm grasslands found skirting the desert north of the southern interior. They are cursorial quadrupeds that feed mostly on small animals and are anatomically little changed from other members of their group in form, excluding their highly elongated, spearing bills. They are covered in a sparse, shaggy plumage over the head, neck and torso but are featherless on all four limbs, which also lack scales and are simply covered in a thick hide that serves to radiate excess heat, and are minimally sexually dimorphic, with males typically being larger and exhibiting a mobile crest on their foreheads and small brightly-colored wattles and bare skin patches along the face. They are descended from a population of primitive omnivores which consumed small insects and animals in addition to plant foods, a generalist tendency which would end up being their saving grace when the strictly vegetarian members of their family would succumb to environmental change and competition from newly-evolving herbivorous tribbetheres.

There are six species of spearrunners extant by this time, the smallest approximately the size of a sheep and the largest weighing three hundred pounds and standing up to six feet tall at the shoulder. All of them are nearly exclusive carnivores, though they will also eat certain fruits, and prey mostly upon the various tribbets as well as any other birds they can capture, particularly the flightless juveniles of ornimorphs and the young and eggs of ground-dwelling fowl. The largest species can take prey as large as adult circuagadonts, but given a choice prefer smaller prey items as the toothy beak of these animals can potentially cause great injury if an initial attack fails to subdue the victim. Spearunners hunt by one of two means; Smaller species prefer to take burrow-dwelling prey, which is quietly stalked from above in a patient waiting game and usually ambushed as soon as it emerges from the ground to forage, either instantly or after a brief high-speed chase. Though the largest species will also feed in this way, it is better suited to endurance running and prefers hunting faster, larger prey that does not find refuge underground. To take down these animals involves a contest of endurance, with the predator trailing its victim until it collapses and then dispatching it.

Spearrunners do not form pair bonds and only the female cares for the young. Males and females are equally solitary for most of the year, but males gather in leks in the mating season to attract females. As in other serezelles, the reproductive system is very mammalian, and the young develops inside the mother. After six to ten months, a single fuzzy chick or rarely twins is born alive and can run within a few days of birth. Because at this stage it would be a liability on the hunt, however, it is instead left alone in a sheltered thicket of tall grass for the first few weeks and fed just once a day for a few minutes on a highly nutritious oil produced in the mother's crop. Eventually, the mother begins bringing back whole prey and then injured but still living animals on which the chick can hone its predatory instincts and by two months of age it is competent enough to follow its mother regularly on her hunts and further practice its skills. The mother-offspring bond is weak, and the young is independent by six months of age, though is not fully grown until six to twenty months later, following with the changeling bird tendency to become independent well before adulthood. This has been a reversion from the extremely rapid development of the ancestral perching bird to a state more like the dinosaurs from which they descended.