The Kyran Islands: The Snuffalo and the Butcherraptor

40 million years have passed now, and life all across Serina is changing fast. Sufficient time has amassed for the birds and other organisms introduced to the little blue moon to be shaped and changed in very drastic ways from ancestral stock. Perhaps nowhere has it changed more quickly and more remarkably, however, than upon the highly isolated Kyran Islands. A literal island within the metaphorical island of Serina itself, this island chain exists in constant flux that continues to showcase some of evolution's strangest solutions to survival.

The first of the Kyrans' distinct endemics were already becoming relics of bygone times when last we visited them: huge and maladapted birds existing at the mercy of carnivorous crabs in a bizarre and gory codependency in an ecosystem lacking in efficient predators. Twenty five million years since, the island's bird life has undergone an almost complete interchange. The pitiful chubbirds are now long since extinct, and the crabs that haunted them relegated back into less sinister seaside scavengers following the arrival of highly competitive new faces from far off lands, and the rise of a group of new island endemic herbivores, forged through a series of small but accumulative changes into some of the most unusual animals ever to walk the land.

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In addition to the chubbirds, the early Kyran Islands had many more native birds - that is, birds whose canary forebears were introduced to the Kyrans directly and which did not evolve on other continents and fly here later. While the chubbirds were briefly dominant, growing huge on a diet which nothing else could obtain and limited only by extreme nestling predation, smaller birds eked out their own niche. Early canaries rapidly specialized their diets and some began feeding on the ground. Not all such species ever grew large, and not all immediately became herbivores.

This lineage, the softbilled birds so named for the fleshy cere that covered much of their bills, would go on to have a very long dynasty of descendants and be ancestral to several major bird clades which would last throughout the entire existence of the Kyran Islands and even long after they are gone. But over the coming eons, the softbilled birds on the Kyran islands would experiment with a novel form of locomotion no bird would ever again replicate. They would become tripeds, and evolve to use their beaks as a third leg.

40 Million Years PE:
The Snuffalo

The Kyran Islands are now a very different place than we left them before. Grassland has come to dominate this once forested island chain, with jungles largely restricted to steep slopes and low ravines. Yet the climate is not much different than it was back then and annual rainfall is still high - it is not drought that has reduced the extent of woodland, but deforestation. The Kyrans are now home to huge herds of herbivores, and they have single-handedly transformed this landscape over millions of years simply by grazing.

They are hulking, low-slung animals appearing from above almost as large as cattle, but in fact much shorter from the side - almost comically so. Shaggy feather coats cloak them and largely obscure their underlying forms, making them appear all the more bewildering. Their legs are small but sturdy, just barely lifting their bodies off the ground, and their heads proportionally massive with huge, downward-pointed beaks, fleshy along much of the length of the top jaw but ending in a gigantic, hard crushing implement. They have no forearms at all to speak of, and they walk by pushing their bulking bodies ahead with their tiny little legs, raising the great beak, and slamming it down ahead of them into the earth, using the great neck muscles powering it to pull the rest of themselves up behind and so advance another meter. These are the snuffalo, the thousand-pound, beak-walking descendants of the canary-kiwi. And it is due to them that the islands have all but lost their forests.

The snuffalo is a remarkable animal. An entirely herbivorous descendant of an insectivore, it took advantage of an evolutionary vacuum left after the extinction of the chubbirds to grow large and return to the daylit world but has nonetheless retained many of the adaptations it gained in its past life. Its eyes remain small; it is color blind and very near-sighted, still relying little on sight to survive. It still finds its way around through touch, feeling vibrations in the earth with its sensitive bill and navigating around its world with huge half-inch thick whisker plumes that sprout in a radial fashion around its bill. For safety it seeks the comfort of others, living in great and gregarious herds limited only by the quantity of food they can find - and they find it in great abundance. The snuffalo travel the islands in their herds, moving almost shoulder to shoulder, slowly but steadily cutting down everything in their wake. To feed the lumbering creatures rest forward on their upper beaks, which are longer and stronger than their lower, while the lower jaw can then open and close freely, pulling mouthfuls of vegetation and then cutting them against a sharp, clipper-like edge of the upper bill. The tongue is very long and mobile, having once adapted to aid the animals' ancestors in pulling insects out of their burrows, and the snuffalo utilizes this now to roll beakfuls of cut hay up and pull them back into the throat to be swallowed. When all the vegetation it can reach while so situated like this, the snuffalo lifts its great bill and takes another step to repeat the process. In feeding in this way, the herds of snuffalo continuously cut down the seedlings of trees, which are not so adapted to quickly recover and grow back from mechanical damage as the grass, and so prevent the forest trees from repopulating their kinds except upon the most angled and inaccessible slopes that the snuffalo, clumsy and poorly balanced, cannot cross. The snuffalo feeds entirely within one meter of the soil, and does not bother adult woody vegetation, yet over so many millions of years of such pressure against their seedlings the ancient adult trees die off, leaving fewer and fewer descendants and accelerating the spread of grassland upon the islands. The snuffalo is thus an ecosystem engineer, actively removing plants that it does not feed on and encouraging the growth of its preferred food, albeit unintentionally.

above: the snuffalo (Rostrambulus gigas, "giant beak-walker"), a huge softbilled bird weighing up to nine hundred pounds which walks using its huge bill as an additional weight-bearing limb.

The snuffalo's life on the islands is far from idyllic, however, since the arrival of a little bird from some far off land beyond the sea. Some twelve million years ago, a flock of shriekers - a group of early carnivore canaries - were blown far from their migratory routes by a strong oceanic storm and through great luck and chance found themselves on the islands. Restricted to a small role in the ecosystem in their native territory on the continents by many larger competitors, these little hunting birds - though fierce predators - fed on little more than insects and the very young chicks of other canaries and had remained relatively primitive since their appearance more than thirty million years ago. On the Kyran Islands though the birds had very few competitors to limit them and food in abundance; naive island birds not used to predation. The shriekers once arrived here quickly adapted and soon gave rise to the shrike-finches, a family of fierce bird-hunting predators that ambushed their quarry by waiting motionless from a hidden perch, then swooping down to deliver a killing bite with a strong bill that evolved a sharp notch at its end used to quickly break the neck of its prey. These were the first major bird predators these islands would see.

Yet as the snuffalo grew large and indirectly deforested its island habitat, the shrike-finches too had to adapt to a less vegetated environment where ambush was less effective and the prey could see them coming from a distance. The shrike-finches now had to outsmart the endemic birds. Their ancestors evolved in highly competitive mainland environments and so they were already intelligent compared to most island birds which lived a comparatively blissful life with few threats; it was only a matter of combining their skills to become a devastatingly efficient force. The shrike-finches began to socialize and cooperate, becoming pack-hunters. A lead member would chase the unwitting prey into a trap where the rest of the group would jump out and kill it, and the group would share the spoils. It was a winning strategy, one the native birds would take many generations to adapt to - and this brought another problem: these new predators ultimately killed off several of their prey species entirely before they had a chance. To avoid the same fate, the shrike-finches had to innovate again. As they depleted songbird populations, they were left with only larger flightless birds they could not tackle alone or in the small groups of parents and offspring they had adapted to live in. To stand any chance at hunting and killing the soft-billed birds many times their own sizes would require even more cooperation. One species began living in huge clans, multigenerational and not all related. Offspring would stay in their parents' packs for their entire leaves and eventually bring in unrelated mates and reproduce themselves in the same cooperative group until these units could number more than fifty individuals. And with this incredible combined power, the shrike-finches learned to hunt big game.

The Butcherraptor

Shrike-finches, by working in packs dozens strong, learned that even the biggest bird around was vulnerable to their attacks. One bird alone is weak - be it predator or prey. This is a fact both the snuffalo and its primary enemy, a large shrike-finch called the butcherraptor both understand very well.

The butcherraptor is not the largest shrike-finch, but it is the most formidable among them. Weighing eight pounds, it is puny compared to the snuffalo in every possible respect but one; brainpower. This predator is cunning and quick-witted, able to formulate plans and change them if need be. The butcherraptor is likely the most intelligent bird on Serina so far.

above: the butcherraptor (Necintussuntus excogitatoris , "inside-out-killing thinker") is a small but ruthlessly efficient, social predator. Despite its size, about that of a chicken, it is one of the island's major predators, with a regular diet of animals that can be more than one hundred times its own weight.

The butcherraptor is almost entirely flightless, its wings now too small to carry it more than a few flaps. It no longer needs to fly, specializing in subduing large and also flightless prey species, and it now runs on the ground like a roadrunner. Groups travel in the open, unafraid, knowing their numbers protect them from even other predators - and more importantly well-aware that the snuffalo cannot outrun them. The entire pack, save for a few individuals that remain at a communal nest site to guard the nestlings during the breeding season, join in a hunt together. The snuffalos, exposed with nowhere to hide, know when they are around and become alert. Though the grass is tall and the raptors can easily hide themselves, it can smell their revolting flesh-eating breath and hear keenly the click of their talons on the pebbled ground and the swishing of the grass stalks as they approach in their ghastly hordes. The prey take defensive posture, pushing together until they are smashed up together like stuffed animals in a claw machine, all with their heads held low and pushed down beneath the plumage of their neighbors, and they sit their rumps on the ground. They do this to protect their eyes, nostrils, and cloacas - any sensitive tissue exposed, the butcherraptors will attack. The snuffalo must rely on their own cooperation to survive, each using the thick feathers and insulating back fat of the others to protect their sensitive regions as the raptors close in. The predators meanwhile are calm and attentive throughout, watching the chaos as the prey struggle each toward the middle of the herd for safety. They leap onto the backs of the snuffalopes and stride over the herd like a crowdsurfer at a rock concert, looking for the easiest target. They chatter constantly to themselves, communicating to coordinate their behavior. One will never act without the others' approval. They prefer to take the young, but will go after any individual that exposes itself to their advances.

If no weak links stand out, the predators will antagonize the entire herd. They gang up and begin to bite at the individuals at the perimeter until one turns to face its attackers in rage, aiming to pulverize one with a vicious bite of its heavy bill. Nimbler than the snuffalo, the butcherraptor almost always avoids the clamping jaws at the last second; this was what it was wanting. Instantly the others of the pack leap at the face of the angered snuffalo and begin to gouge at the eyes and the sensitive skin of the bill with their sharp beaks. This will hopefully have the effect of inducing panic; if the whole herd separates, the butcherraptors will have a chance to catch one of the younger chicks that is sheltered deep in the middle of the group, which will be a much easier kill. If this occurs then the raptors drop off their first target and mob the easier option. Some individuals stave off the parents, which will try to protect their young, while others work to quickly kill and disable the victim. It does not always work. If the other snuffalos in the herd choose fight over flight and come to the defense of the attacked individual, the pack will often call off the hunt as they cannot risk being trampled or crushed in the jaws of the others while trying to subdue just one individual. Killing healthy adults is not unknown, but it is difficult; primarily it is the very old and unwell snuffalo, shunned from the herd, which they manage. It is a grisly end for such individuals, as the raptors - their beaks too weak to cut through the thick skin, target them through their most sensitive orifices, eating them from the inside out.

above: a pack of butcherraptors have singled out a young snuffalo and begin to target its weak spots. Though each of these predators is only as large as a chicken, through sheer numbers they overwhelm their prey in a literal death by one thousand cuts. (art by Trollmans.Deviantart.com)

Butcherraptors succeed in about half of their hunts and feed primarily on first-year chicks. Among wild predator this is a high success rate, but the snuffalo population remains stable because though the butcherraptors are efficient predators, their small size means that one kill can feed a colony for weeks before they must hunt again. Combined with a relatively high reproductive output of the prey - the snuffalos hatch out broods of up to ten chicks every year, a process which is also synchronized for safety in numbers - the predator and prey remain at balance. Yet even though most adult snuffalo survive butcherraptor attacks, they do not always escape unscatched; many adults are left blinded from unsuccessful hunts, their eyes pecked out by their assailants; fortunately the snuffalo, being so adapted to forage through touch, do not need their vision to survive.