The Scrunge

A sizeable four-legged ornimorph bird descended from the skuorc, the scrunge makes use of its generalized diet and unique bodyplan - including a long, balancing tail - to grow larger than its ancestors and infiltrate entirely new niches.

The scrunge is a very large skuorc species growing up to twelve feet long, that occurs in the soglands of Serinarcta. A faculative biped, these animals walk on all fours but run on their hind legs alone. An increase in body size in a hot, wet climate has resulted in the loss of much of the body plumage, leaving them half-bald with a sparse and greasy coat of black, wiry feathers over their backs and bellies and extremities covered in small scutes. With a long, low-hanging, featherless tail, webbed scaly feet, and a blunt bill adapted as much for catching small animals as tearing water plants, the omnivorous, amphibious scrunge resembles some fusion of a muskrat, and a rather outdated depiction of a duckbilled dinosaur.

Adult scrunges are mesotherms, intermediate in metabolism between most birds and cold-blooded animals such as lumpuses which have no control over their body temperature at all. Though they maintain their bodies slightly over ambient temperatures, in the high 80's Fahrenheit, it can range higher or lower depending on its exposure to sun or shade. Chicks are full endotherms that maintain a body temperature in the high 90's and so can always be ready to run quickly and escape potential enemies.

Scrunges are loosely social, moving in groups to better spot predators. A sentry often stands guard on its hind legs, scanning the horizon as its fellows feed by dunking their heads underwater in shallow swamps and ponds. Most of their diet is plants plucked from below water, though they are able to eat a wide variety of things, basically whatever they can catch, including fish, crustaceans, birds' eggs and the occasional bird itself. Though they are not highly intelligent animals, they nonetheless provide some parental care to their chicks, which imprint on their mother and remain in her vicinity for several months after being born and so benefit from her presence to avoid smaller predators. They leave her care well before adult size is reached in around three years, however, and juveniles form bands with similarly aged adolescents before eventually rejoining adult groups at sexual maturity. Both young and adults respond to danger by fleeing into deep water and diving, holding their breath for up to fifteen minutes. Only if there is nowhere to hide will they turn and fight an attacker, though they have few significant defenses for their size, with only small claws and blunt bills. Rarely found away from larger waterways as a result, adolescent male scrunges may migrate over land at night to seek new feeding grounds and so keep the population from any given area from becoming too inbred.