Polar Anciska and the Ninth-year Canary

The Last Woodland

In one of the few relatively isolated continents still left on Serina at the end of the Thermocene, Polar Anciska, survives one of the last temperate sunflower and bamboo mixed forests on Serina, and certainly the largest. The climate here is not cold enough to snow with regularity, but frost occurs for several months in the fall along the islands' northern coast, and plant growth halts during the winter season, even if not all plants lose their leaves. Due to the island's isolation and polar location, it has so far been less affected by the recent climate change of the end Thermocene boundary in comparison to large continents to the south - indeed, becoming milder in climate has only increased its productivity. The dominant herbivores here are aardgeese and similar primitive flightless canaries, including some tall browsers, but none as large as the serestriders of bygone days which survived in the larger mainland forests. There are relatively few terrestrial predators here, and most carnivores are in form of large airborne birds of prey. Small songbirds are abundant of course, feeding on rich pickings of seeds, fruit, buds and insects. There are no tribbets and no true mudwickets, though terrestrial eels hunt worms underground and in the leaf litter, and amphibious sorts ambush prey along the shores of rivers and pools. Insects are diverse in the form of crickets and beetles, assassin grasses are absent, and ant symbiotic bamboo trees still persist here, though nowhere near to the extremes of specialization seen in tropical locales in the past. Overall, even at the end of the Thermocene, Polar Anciska remains a vibrant island of life and a trove of living fossils and early-divergent organisms - an ark of early diversity in a changing world.

The Fleeting Relic

The island also happens to be the sole home, however, of at least one very derived bird - a group which colonized fairly recently from the south within the last few million years. It also happens to be one of the most beautiful and melodious, yet elusive, of all birds on Serina. It is a fluttering, faerie-like creature, shaped and sized like a common sparrow, but of incredible color to which few other birds can compare. Its tiny body shimmers brightly in the dappled forest sunlight with countless shades; violet, scarlet, green, blue and gold, among others. Indeed, there is scarcely a color in the rainbow not present somewhere upon its feathered tapestry. In addition, it sports a melodious, bubbling song, seemingly far too loud to have ever come from such a tiny body, that fills the last temperate wood with life, sung by both sexes with equal vigor and beauty. Flitting through patches of sun and of shade, males and females alike warble and whistle with abandon, sometimes for several days before coming in contact with another of their kind, so rare is their species. Their songs become faster and more excited upon hearing another of their kind in the distance and as soon as contact is heard, both parties make a beeline toward the source of the other song. The closer the pair come to one another until they join in a lengthy paired duet, a varied song of unrivaled melody that could hold its own among all songbirds, which becomes faster and faster until the birds meet and copulate. Once partnered, male and female will mate for life, fluttering from that point on in tandem and calling in duet, never apart for long, as if the partners simply cannot afford to spend a moment without their beloved. In truth, they cannot, for the birds' time together is remarkably fleeting; it can be found in the forest only for about a month, and then it vanishes completely and suddenly within a matter of days. The forest falls eerily silent, and it will be nearly a decade before the woodland is serenaded again by the sweetly fleeting melody of the ninth-year canary.

The ninth-year canary.

~~~

The ninth-year canary, as its name suggests, is a changeling bird with an even more specialized lifestyle than most; it matures into an adult only in the summer of its ninth year. For the vast majority of its life, it exists as a blind, embryo-like larvae feeding deep underground on the roots of forest trees and plants, gnawing at the tough tissues with its sharp mandibles and digging through the dirt with its claws. This diet is incredibly meager compared to its ancestral one of meat and protein, providing so little in the way of nutrition that it takes eight full growing seasons to attain sufficient mass to transform into an adult bird. Indeed, without symbiotic stomach bacteria, the larvae would not be able to digest the cellulose of the trees' woody tissues at all. But little by little, the larvae of the canary does manage to gather everything it needs to become a bird.

At that time, that brief period of maturity, in which all ninth-year canaries in a given population miraculously time their emergence from the ground together pairs do little more than court and mate. Unlike most changelings, male and female are identical, likely because their lifestyle doesn't require they utilize different food resources. Both sexes sing, unusually for their family, likely due to the need to find others of their kind after emerging, being a species with a very low population density. Indeed the ninth-year canary is quite distinct from most of its kin in several respects: it is non-dimorphic, both in appearance and niche, and male and female are equally sized and eat the same foods - seeds, nectar, insects and a small amount of green leaves and buds. They are also monogamous, picking only a single mate and staying with them for the remainder of their lives. It is still an r-strategist like its ancestors, however, and the sheer length of time it takes to mature mean that only a very small percentage of its offspring survive to adulthood - perhaps one out of one hundred in the best of conditions.

The female ninth-year canary does not search out any sort of nest in which to lay her eggs, and she does not provide her young with anything to eat. Throughout the duration of her short lifespan, she simply deposits them on the forest floor as she forages for food, laying them wherever she is at, every twenty to forty minutes. The eggs are tiny and without shells, protected only by a thin rubbery membrane, and hatch within two days wherever they lie.

The literally maggot-like young of these changeling birds are now even further derived than their early ancestors. They are completely ectothermic, able to survive incredibly low temperatures by going dormant, returning to growth when conditions warm, and are now entirely free-living and generalist in diet; their mother is now completely freed of parental duty, and the minute larvae simply wriggle into the cool, moist refuge of the leaf litter and begin to feed themselves on anything organic that they come across. The majority of her young will not survive, whether they are hatched in a location unsuitable for their survival or more likely are eaten by predators early on, but by laying so many more eggs than she requires to replace herself and her mate in the population, she hedges her bets and ensures that most likely, at least two will manage. The young are most vulnerable to predators in their first few days, as they crawl through the the leaf litter and are easily snapped up by other birds, invertebrates and fishes hunting on the ground. Once they move below ground and beneath the root systems of the trees, there are far fewer predators able to access them, and they are insulated from cold winter temperatures. Nonetheless, nine years is a very long time to spend growing up, and the odds are not in their favor that at some point during that time they will not run into some sort of predator. The lucky few which avoid an early end spend the better part of the next decade slowly gnawing away on roots and rhizomes, gradually growing into a pink grub-shaped blob up to ten times their adult size. Toward the fall of their eighth year, when plump and fat, they construct a burrow just below the surface in which to pupate. Spending the winter dormant in its larval state, it rapidly begins developing over the course of two to three months as soon as spring arrives, to emerge from the ground as a fully-fledged mature adult bird toward the height of the Serinan summer, timed just right for when their choice foods are most abundant.

After courting and mating around the clock for several weeks time, both sexes will die. The process comes over the birds rapidly, and most frequently they go from fluttering with vigor in the morning, sleepy in the afternoon, and fallen from their perches before nightfall. Males typically die several days earlier than the females, most likely of exhaustion, for they feed less than females in their intense urge to mate, particularly toward the end of the breeding season. The female typically remains near the male as he passes, as if to provide comfort. Females follow within a weeks' time, seemingly of nothing more than loneliness. In fact starvation is usually the acute causative agent, but only because the female all but ceases to feed when her partner dies, no matter how much food remains available to her. Though she has used up all of her eggs by this time and rendered infertile, there seems no practical reason that she would not be able to survive considerably longer, but evolution has apparently rendered her species, through a combination of biological and behavioral adaptations, so that she spends no more time than she needs to to reproduce her kind.

So strong is the ninth-years' innate behavioral pattern that if a female's mate is killed early in the season, even though she may still be carrying fertile eggs and other males may court her, she will very rarely accept another mate and will pine just as she would otherwise, several weeks earlier, suggesting that the mechanism behind her short lifespan truly is behavioral in nature - they simply stop feeding after the loss of their partners. It is possible such a behavior evolved initially so that parents would not compete with their offspring, but given the extreme disparity between the lifespan of the adult in this instance and the period it takes its young to mature, if this were ever effective, it no longer has any practical application today.

~~~

Free-living larvae are not unique to the ninth-year canary, but evolved as long as 20 million years ago. Presumably, they originated from especially mobile nest-bound larvae which, perhaps provided with insufficient larders to feed them until maturity, crawled out of their nest sites to find food elsewhere. To aid them, their sense of smell became more developed at an earlier age, their metabolism adjusted so that they could continue to feed and grow at ambient temperatures and their diets broadened to include plant foods - with the side effects that such meals are considerably less nutritious, and in conjunction with a slowed metabolism growth would take longer as a result. The ninth-year canary's system is, however, an extreme example, and most of its kin mature much more quickly, in a matter of months.

The selection forces behind the lengthy infancy of the ninth-year canary are unknown, but it has been hypothesized that the modern ninth-year bird may in fact be a relic species headed towards extinction, which historically may have existed at far great population density and emerged in huge numbers which emerged in swarms to overwhelm predators, similarly to the periodical cicada on Earth. What could have so greatly reduced the birds population to only a few thousand adults across all of the island during emergent years - hardly enough to overwhelm any predators, and in some locales so few that pairs may have to travel substantial distances just to find a single mate - is unknown. Perhaps a less stable climate resulting from recent global warming is to blame, an increase in unseasonable warm periods early in the season and unpredictable cold spells later over the past few thousand years having caused most of the former population to emerge at unfavorable times and not manage to reproduce, leaving only a fraction of their kind left today. It also has no close relatives on the island or anywhere else with so drastically long a larval period to compare it to. Whatever the mechanism behind its evolution, the ninth-year canary, even though its day may be coming to an end, will still go down as one of Serina's most fleeting natural wonders.