Clash of Giants: Boomsingers and Bumblebears

The towertree taiga is the last tall forest of Serina in the Mid-Ultimocene ice age, 265 million years post-establishment. The influence of ocean currents in the seaway to the south keeps this region just warm enough to sustain a woodland community dominated by immense sunflower trees closely related to cactaiga, the towertrees themselves, which are one of the tallest trees ever to live on Serina, on par with redwoods and reaching similar heights in excess of 290 feet tall. Towertrees are notable for their unusual growth form, in which branches radiate out around a single erect trunk in a pattern that wraps around as it goes like a spiral staircase, a condition also seen in some cacti, and originating in a far smaller desert-growing ancestor plant.

This taiga forest is sustained by high humidity air which rises from the nearby sea, keeping the tree's surfaces damp enough that they are colonized by a wide variety of mosses and epiphytes. This is an extremely green landscape, even in the face of the ice age, and though snow may fall at night it always melts away by day thanks to the unusual equatorial conditions, combined with the very cold global temperatures, condensing the temperature extremes of annual seasons into a single day, as determined by the height of the sun - warm enough days for plants to grow quickly cool off at dusk; when it sets, temperatures rapidly plummet, and those same plants must endure the night's frost. Towertrees, with needle-like foliage and an antifreeze property to their sap thanks to a dense concentration of sugars, some of which are metabolized into alcohols including ethylene glycol, are well-adapted to these conditions.

Many animals live in this unique biome, including Serina's largest land creatures still to be found, the boomsingers. Three species in total are found in or around the taiga, including the birchbark boomsinger already seen on the harp steppe, but the tallest is its close relative the striated boomsinger, Arborimitornis gigas (giant tree-mimicking-bird). It is distinctively marked with horizontal neck stripes which match the rings of dead, pale branches that line the lower trunks of the towertrees, and so provide effective camouflage, especially at a distance, when their necks line up with the trees and become very hard to distinguish. These animals are able to reach 28 feet tall, an impressive size for the era. Though much smaller than some of their earlier relatives, simply due to the need to navigate between the densely packed trees of the forest, they now tower over almost all other animals; only the ziraphan, a giant trunko which can also be found here, approaches but never exceeds their maximum height. The two animals are among the only birds which consume towertrees, for they are poisonous to varying degrees on account of their defenses against the cold. Both types of animals feed on the towertree's needles, using their huge size and accordingly large livers to help filter out toxins in this diet that would harm smaller species, but only the boomsingers have evolved to digest the toxic alcohol antifreeze in them and process it back into usable sugars. This, of course, gives them some advantage - mainly letting them eat all portions of the tree, at all times of day or night, while ziraphans must stick to the newest growth and primarily feed on it by day when they have the lowest alcohol concentrations.

The ability of the boomsingers to full digest toxic towertrees means that they, too, can provide a food source to other animals which could otherwise not survive here. Large carnivores are relatively rare in the taiga because there is a narrow range of sizes large enough to potentially eat a boomsinger, but not so large as to be unable to navigate the forest's narrow pathways. The biggest regular predator of the habitat is the duke, but it cannot hunt such a prey animal - it mostly feeds on smaller trunkos. But occasionally, especially along the margins of the forest, the truculent bumblebear will make a foray through the trees in search of food. And this is, today, the only animal that can at least sometimes kill the striated boomsinger.

It is not easy, for even though this huge bumblet can weigh almost half a ton, and if it stands on its hind legs easily stands thirteen feet high, fully adult striated boomsingers outweigh them by at least four times. They are simply too large to kill unless they are already very weakened by age or illness. But their young are a different story. Boomsinger calves are completely defenseless for a year or more, and their lives depend on their mother's care and protection until they are big enough to defend themselves. The truculent bumblebear seeks to separate mother and calf just long enough to strike the young one with its forearms, each of which can swat with the force of a 30 mile per hour car crash, instantly crushing the bones in its prey's neck and dispatching it immediately. Then all it has to do is wrestle the carcass out from under its mother and run off. 

But of course, the mother does her best to protect her calf. She kicks and stomps, bellowing fiercely all the while, and if the bear is not swift enough, she can kill him, too. Though they have no claws to speak of on their feet, which are simply spongey, shock-absorbing pads, the strength in their legs is still enough to break the bear's neck if she were to come down upon it. So whenever the two species meet, it is a dance of life and death. For the health of the population, the hunter needs to lose more often than he wins. But in these changing times, when the world is growing quickly colder and ecosystems are becoming unstabilized, this is not the case. The towertrees don't grow as big as they used to, nor do as many seedlings take root, so that the forest is becoming less dense. This allows the bumblebear greater ease of access to the boomsinger calves, which did not evolve under such high predation pressure. The striated boomsinger is now endangered, and if conditions continue to change on the course they are, the largest land animal of the next era will be far smaller than it is today. The bumblebear species on the whole, for its part, does not depend on the boomsinger for its survival. An opportunist, it simply takes advantage of food wherever it finds it. Unfortunately for the boomsinger, it has no concept of conservation.