Seashore Scavengers

Along the coasts of Serinaustra, varied animals find a place foraging where sand meets sea. Alongside shorescroungers live other creatures, partitioning their niches in a wide ring of habitat that circles much of the southern continent.

Some beach combers avoid competitors by waiting until the night to emerge from their hiding places and hunt for food. The nightcreeper, a small burdle, only leaves its den when the sky is dark and most other animals have gone to bed. Burrowing burdles have descended into many new groups since their arrival on the southern continent. Brutes have gotten much bigger and fearsome, while seastriders are now large but docile swimmers. Many burdles on land, though, have begun to grow to smaller adult sizes, something which is not at all difficult, for they begin their lives effectively as independent miniature versions of the adult. All it takes to become a smaller animal is simply to pass through puberty earlier in life through chance mutation, and so breed before most of your relatives. Small animals use less food resources than big ones. Small burdles specifically can move faster more easily, especially considering the awkward anatomy of the back-projected burdle shoulder joint, which becomes much less efficient at bearing weight at large scales, and they can hide and avoid enemies and competitors easier too. In the competitive world of Serina after the ice age, all of these things have favored the evolution of several new lineages of burdles which attain much smaller adult sizes than their ancestor.

In the dark, foggy nights of northern Serinaustra's coastal regions and saltswamps the nightcreeper emerges to hunt. Adults are now only as big as large house cats, averaging 15 - 20 lbs in weight. They are strictly nocturnal, spending the daytime hours in a torpor-like state underground in dens dug into high ground or within hollows in the roots of dancing tree thickets, conserving their energy. Yet once the sun is down, and the landscape comes alive with scuffling shadows and calls from unseen beasts, the nightcreeper comes into its own. It travels up to ten miles in a single night, not sticking to a territory but wandering anywhere it might detect food, and then coming back to its den just before dawn. For a burdle its dark eyes are fairly large, but scent and hearing are more developed senses. It is an omnivore, with a wide diet, not unlike many other animals which have only recently evolved in the early hothouse age from generalist ancestors. It uses its sharp forearm claws, held backwards while it walks on its knuckles to keep them sharp, to dig out the hiding places of smaller creatures like crabs and bird larvae in the soil or behind tree bark. It sometimes feeds on roots and tubers, the starches in which provide a lot of calories to fuel its long foraging trips so that it can catch something meatier and higher in nutrients. Fruit is enjoyed, and the nightcreeper will climb to get it, striking its claws into the bark of the dancing trees like pick axes, and climbing up like a mountaneer. But one of the nightcreeper's most favored strategies to hunt is to scour the long stretches of sea coast. 

When the shorescroungers return to their dens and spend the night asleep in their huddles, the nightcreeper takes the graveyard shift. While the scrounger mainly seeks carrion - and certainly the nightcreeper will eat it too - it comes here in the dark hours mostly to hunt live prey. In the humid shadows, protected then from the drying effects of the sun, the crabs and the snarks of the shallows emerge onto dry land to find their own food, flee swimming enemies, or even to mate. The nightcreeper runs along the beaches, freezing when it spots movement. Both of these invertebrate prey have excellent vision and will flee down their burrows, or into the waves, if they detect they are being watched. But the nightcreeper is patient, moving in quick, stilted motions each time its quarry turns away. When it comes close enough it pounces with great speed, catching something in its powerful beak and killing it with a crushing bite. Now it tears its victim up, holding it down against the sand with its claws and tearing with a backwards thrust of its neck.

Nightcreepers avoid the many varied enemies of their own with a trick hardly worth mentioning among other birds, but very rare among the burdles; bipedal running. These small animals can rise onto their back feet, which are more digitigrade than their ancestor, and dash away from danger at some 25 miles per hour for short distances. They seek to find dense cover that their predators cannot follow, but if they cannot find it will try to dodge and turn to outmaneuver their attackers. If cornered, though, they will not hesitate to fight. Rising onto hind legs again, they now face the threat head-on, slashing with their arm claws and aiming for the eyes. A well-timed hit can blind an enemy. Even tiny baby nightcreepers, only 4 inches tall, can do these behaviors, first seeking to dart away from danger, but just as willing to stand and fight as a last resort. Yet they are still very small at hatching, much smaller than most hunters, and abandoned to fight their own battles almost immediately by their mothers. Large litters ensure some make it, but the majority are caught by predators in the first year. 

Shoresnatches, unlike nightcreepers, are diurnal hunters. The sandpiping seraph has given rise to this slightly larger and more fully terrestrial ground predator which stalks the coasts by day and spears small animals in its long beak - including the tiny young of the nightcreeper. Though these swan-sized archangels can fly, they prefer to stride along the ground and their wings are shorter than their ancestor's; their gliding hind wings are now vestigial as they no longer soar, and are rapidly being lost. These birds are found on both continents, for though they prefer to walk they remain capable of strong, long distance flight and so occasionally cross the ocean. 

While shorescroungers are true oppurtunists and eat almost anything they find, shoresnatches are hunters of small, live prey. They like marginal habitats; seashores, lakeshores, and where forests meet grassy openings are preferred territories. They have long tweezer-shaped beaks and long necks to dart ahead and snatch small prey off the ground, particularly snarks such as gupgops, molodonts such as poppits, tiny trunkos like snifflers, and smaller burdles such as the newly-diversifying murds. Crabs, fish, lumpuses, large insects, molluscs, and earthworms are also readily taken. Prey is shaken to disable it, but often swallowed whole and alive. Different populations, even within one species, specialize on different food sources and habitat types, learning what to eat from their parents and often shunning other food sources once adult in an example of animal culture.

 Shoresnatches usually hunt in pairs or small groups of 3-4; these groups are stable social units of individuals and not random aggregations. As they stalk they often move in a line through tall grass or shallow water, startling out prey which is intercepted by others in the group. Though they will sometimes feed in water up to sixteen inches deep these birds are not well-adapted waders, with fairly short legs and wings that are fully-feathered, and so they prefer to remain on dry land at the edge of the water.

These seraphs usually raise their young in large colonies on sandbanks in large rivers or offshore islands in the sea; nests consist merely of a depression in the sand. Females of these species lack a full pouch like the pocketfowl, but do have the beginnings of such a structure in the form of a fold of skin that they lay over their pupating young to keep them warm and safe. Once emerged, the young can fly in just a few days time and will leave the nest site with their parents. Though the adults provide food for the young and use their sharp beaks to cut open and dismember prey into bite-sized pieces for their chicks, the young are also able to start foraging for themselves immediately, hunting insects until they grow big enough to switch to their adult prey. Because all shoresnatches start life as small insect-catching chicks, insects are usually accepted as food by all adults too, even those which otherwise selectively feed only on foods as varied and different as small burdles, burrowing molodonts, worms, or clams.

Social bonds that will remain through life develop very early in shoresnatchers and most bonded adult groups are merely siblings which have always lived together; integration of unrelated individuals occurs, but only in cases where chicks lack any same-sex siblings. These sibling groups begin with both males and females, but at the age of 2 females leave their brothers to mate and nest while males take no part in child-rearing. Bonded female groups cooperatively raise all of their young in one large creche of up to thirty chicks, and their maternal instinct is so strong that they occasionally may adopt - or steal - young from other groups and end up with more than sixty babies in tow. It is very difficult to feed so many young as they grow, however, and the mothers recognize their own babies and will give them preferential care if food is limited. It is possible that though the mother's instincts to adopt other chicks are driven by genuinely altruistic motivations, the evolutionary reason for the behavior is so that extra unrelated babies are present along the edge of the family so that predators pick them and not the young the mothers are related to.