Serestriders

Gentle Giants of the Western Woods

Though vivas, which evolved after the separation of Anciska and Striata, are still restricted to Serina's eastern continents, the broader aardgoose family from which they descend has a cosmopolitan range. Though representatives here are not as diverse ecologically as their kin in the east, they still comprise a very wide variety of herbivores, among them the largest terrestrial bird anywhere on Serina by this time.

In the sprawling tropical and temperate forests and woodland savannahs of equatorial South Anciska can be found a group of enormous browsing aardgeese known as serestriders, some of which can reach heights of forty feet and weights of several tons. Adapted to browse the highest branches of trees inaccessible to most other animals, many species have evolved necks that make up more than half their heights in addition to long and robust hind legs. The body is carried mainly horizontally and the stomach is proportionally quite large in order to effectively ferment a diet of leaves and branches without ruminating, as the more derived serilopes are able to do. They lack the adaptations of their eastern relatives to chew their food before swallowing and instead crop leaves and shoots whole with their goose-like serrated beak, then swallow the pieces whole and break them down in a large gizzard, aided by many pounds of rocks swallowed to aid in crushing the food to a gritty pulp before it is swallowed. Anywhere that forests grow here, serestriders in some form are likely to occur in abundance, either living a solitary life in the depths of a shady forest glade or moving in migratory herds of a hundred or more on the plains, forced to move constantly from one patch of woods to another lest they deplete their food supply.

A solitary bull elegant serestrider browses peacefully upon the canopies of a bamboo woodland in the quiet of dawn whilst largely still hidden in shadow, the sun just beginning to creep upward from the horizon. Able to reach leaves more than thirty feet above the ground, it has few competitors for food here - and at such a size, few predators are likely worry it, allowing an adult serestrider to feed at a leisurely pace. In the event a large carnivore does threaten the gentle giant, it hides a secret weapon under its muscular arms; normally folded out of sight, the bones of the hand have fused into a giant scythe claw which lies hidden against its torso, which the strider does not hesitate to flash if pressed by unwelcome attention.

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Serestriders perhaps most notably differ from vivas in their reproduction. While vivas are extreme K-strategists - producing only a single chick at a time and nurturing it through a lengthy childhood - serestriders are oppositely extreme r-strategists. Instead of one egg in a season, a female produces as many as ten to fifteen of them over as many days. Being too large to incubate them, she instead lays them in large mounds of sandy soil and decomposing leaves in forest clearings or the edges of jungles where a combination of the sun and the heat gained from the decay of the plant matter will keep them warm, returning every day to deposit another egg into the pile with a long, extendable cloaca that can reach down to ground level and bury the egg into the soil. Every morning the mother-to-be will return to the nest, pile another few inches of soil over the surface, and deposit an egg before moving off to feed, sometimes making a round trip of ten miles or more every day to do so. Though she may guard the mound halfheartedly for as long as she is actively laying, once her last egg is dropped, she pays no further attention to the nest. Even though she lays her first and last egg as long as two weeks apart, the chicks will typically all hatch within a day of one another due to the fact that the eggs laid even only a few days earlier and near the base of the mound in the spring will develop at a slightly slower rate than those laid later and toward the top of the nest mound where the sun's heat is more direct. As females typically nest in close quarters to each-other in favorable nest sites where the soil is soft and most suited to mound-building, the result is that as many as several hundred chicks will emerge at once. The young are super-precocial and fully able to run and feed themselves at birth, and though many surely are killed whilst emerging and in the days following, the sheer numbers of chicks are usually enough to satiate any local predators and ensure at least a small percentage survive the initial onslaught and escape into the forest.

Serestriders are often spotted significantly far south of the tropics and populations of some species may migrate even down through southern Stevhlandea and into the antarctic circle during the summer, feeding in taiga forests, but all species must make the lengthy trek northwards again towards the equator to breed, for only here is the summer long enough to incubate their eggs. Some species may make this trek only a few times per decade while others breed annually and do not stray as far away from their nesting grounds through the rest of the year. Though in their first few years mortality is high, once they near their adult size serestriders have few natural predators and very long lifespans which give them time to skip a nesting season occasionally and still produce enough surviving offspring to replace themselves in the future breeding population.

Serestriders reach sexual maturity much earlier than might be expected, between ten and twenty years of age, often when they are nowhere near fully grown, though the males are rarely able to mate until much older due to competition with far larger senior males. Though they do eventually stop growing, this may not be until the age of fifty, albeit beyond twenty-five or so the rate of increase each year slows dramatically. Adults may still make the trek to breed at advanced ages of 150 years, though fertility - particularly in females - is likely diminished far before this time. Males, however, remain fertile and may continue to sire offspring throughout their lifetimes, and thus the most common pairings are typically of very old males, which typically win mating rights due to their size, and much younger females. Serestriders are not even a little monogamous; solitary species live lonesome lives while in herding species usually only immature young and adult females live together, with the adult males being pushed out of the group at maturity to live lives as loners or in loose bachelor groups. Most species are thus dimorphic, with larger and more colorful males that compete for female companionship during the nesting season. A particularly strong old male may oust every competitor in its range and mate with more than one hundred females in a season, making many species highly reliant on migration to other areas to prevent inbreeding once these siblings mature.