The Seamingo

The Seamingo

A flock of a hundred colorful orange birds glide low over a calm green ocean. With narrow pointed wings and a long thin neck that projects forward, they are well-suited to soar over the water with a minimum of wing beats. Flight feathers line their webbed hind legs, providing additional lift. With wingspans of up to fifteen feet they soar majestically, calling with warbling, melodious calls to one another. As the flock descends, they lower their hind legs and smoothly fold up their flight feathers by the use of a mobile fifth digit - a stabilizing rod that has evolved on the outer edge of the foot to provide better control of the hind wing. Finally, with a splash, each of the large birds settles onto the water with its hind legs down paddling and its forewings tucked along its sides, the long feathered flight fingers angling outward and behind it. Their bills have a strange furry appearance, both the top and bottom jaws being lined with a sieve of extremely fine bristles of keratin.They dip their snouts into the water and begin quickly sucking water into their crops until their throats are visibly inflated. Once this storage structure is full, they close their bills and begin to pump it back out again through the mouth. The water now escapes through through the bristles that serve like a net to filter the released water of its phytoplankton, which provides the main source of food for these elegant water birds. Once their crops are drained, they repeat the process until their stomachs are full of the nutritious algae, the carotenoids contained within being sequestered into their otherwise white plumage and providing them with their vibrant orange coloration. Though they also consume considerable quantities of microscopic crustaceans, their main diet is a vegetarian one.

They are the seamingos and they are descended from the flying metamorph giants known as archangels. More specifically, they are some of the more uniquely adapted members of a now common and highly diverse clade of quadrupedal metamorph birds collectively known as quaddles - "quad" referring to their four-legged walking gait, combined with "waddle" as a result of their convergent evolution to ducks - that have evolved to fill the niches of waterfowl. Mostly than their ancestors, many different quaddle species, all of which originally evolved from the giant grazers, now have become adapted to feed in marshes, rivers and lakes upon the varied food sources they can provide. Some dabble for water plants and others feed on crustaceans, but the seamingos uniquely have become filter-feeders on the open ocean, sifting the fertile shallow seas for microscopic phytoplankton growing just below the surface with highly elongated bill serrations used by their ancestor to crop vegetation. While on Earth such a niche is possible for birds to exploit only in a few places, particularly salt lakes and some freshwater environments, the more fertile shallow oceans of Serina mean that algae grows abundantly enough to support flocks of nomadic filter-feeding birds that spend most of their life out to sea, soaring on the wind and landing to feed on the thickest algal blooms that pop up across the waters. As their ancestors crossed thousands of miles over land in search of seasonal flushes of green grass, the seamingos now do over the high seas, searching for blooms of the algae that nourishes them.

above: a pair of seamingos upon Serina's green-tinted, algae-rich open ocean.

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The seamingos cavort and feed, swimming slowly forward with their heads stretched forward and down, swishing their flat bills over the surface of the water and sucking it in and out through their filtering plates. They cackle quietly but constantly among one another, occasionally dipping their head beneath the surface to grab a clump of seaweed. If the water stays calm enough, they will feed for several hours and then rest, tucking their heads back into their plumage and bobbing on the water like buoys. They may spend days at a time floating on a particularly dense patch, but eventually, once well-fed and rested, the flock will lift off again. Though as heavy as swans and even more lanky, they take off vertically from the surface of the water, propelling themselves predominately with a powerful push of their wings against its surface that is of sufficient strength to vault them into the wind. A few strong, rapid wing beats is then all it takes to become fully airborne and ride the wind again to the next feeding ground. Different species of them occur over all the planet's seasexcept the most extremely polar, taking advantage of blooms of algae wherever they occur. Because the largest blooms are unpredictable and widely spaced far out to sea, it would be difficult for the seamingos to partake in such a diet were they tied to raising their offspring for a prolonged period at a nesting colony as are the sparrowgulls and seabirds of epochs past. Fortunately the seamingos' ancestors long ago solved that issue for them - all archangels have forgone parental care. The males never come to land, even molting at sea through a drawn-out process that occurs gradually enough that the bird is never incapable of flight at any one time. The females fly ashore just once a year, after the age of two or three, to bury their eggs communally on warm tropical beaches and leave incubation to the sun. When the chicks finally hatch they are fully independent and so well developed as to be capable of flight almost immediately - as soon as they shiver enough to heat their bodies above ambient temperatures and jump-start their active adult metabolism. Under cover of darkness, synchronized over a few days, they take to the air and instinctively head toward the ocean.

The young chicks spend their first few months in shallow coastal waters where they feed differently from the adults on account of a less specialized anatomy. Their filter feeding apparatus is not yet developed and their bills at this age more closely resemble those of other archangels - or earth waterfowl - with only small serrations present that will eventually transition into the seining bristles of the adult's beak. Until this occurs they have a broader diet of water plants, algae and most importantly small fish and crustaceans that provide the protein they require to quickly reach their adult size. Within six months to a year their bills begin to take on the form of the adult. Slowly the tips of both their upper and lower mandibles begin to grow apart so that when the transition is completed the seamingo is unable to fully close them together - instead, the interlocking siene of bristles from both mandibles grow to meet in the gap, producing a structure perfectly designed to let out water without letting out nutriment. As this occurs they shift their diet increasingly toward free-floating algae and begin to move further out to sea, seeking out others of their species and beginning their nomadic adult lifestyle. Even at a day of age however the young seamingo is independent of land and can adeptly glide over the waves and float on the sea's surface to feed, swishing their beaks across the surface to grab small zooplankton or scraping along the blades of sea bamboo to find small creatures hiding there. Though seamingos can soar they cannot sleep on the wing like some seabirds and so must land on the water to rest. Flocks float bunched together to sleep for safety, tightly packed in aggregations of dozens or hundreds. To stay together while asleep roosting seamingos hold hands, grasping one another with the two clawed digits on their wings to secure themselves together so the group is not broken apart by waves. They float like corks - a result of highly pneumatic bones and a body strewn with airsacs, and even the newborns are waterproof; their preen oil gland is large and fully functional out of the egg and their plumage is kept waterproof with frequent grooming.

Seamingo chicks hatch out pearly white, obtaining their orange color within three months once they begin to store carotenoids from their diet in their bodies and molt out their first set of natal plumage. They do not obtain their brightest plumage until they transition to their adult diet at the age of six months to a year. Though their choice of food turns them pink or orange, seamingos are actually all predominately white birds just like their ancestors, with very little melanin in their plumage - only their wingtips, where melanin strengthens the feathers and provides resistance to wear, and sometimes markings upon the head and neck are produced via melanin. A separate yellow pigment does occur in their plumage however, the very same one that gave the original canary bird its own color, which is actually responsible for the orange coloration of most seamingos. When combined with the carotenoids in their plumage it produces such lovely shades of warm orange; species that produce less yellow pigment are pink or red.