Grapplers

Grapplers

The forest falls silent as the gmu struggles in the jaws of its predator. At first it is desperate to escape the inescapable grasp, kicking blindly as the hunter's claws wrap around its neck, cutting off its air supply. The effort is valiant, but futile. As its killer closes its many-clawed talons over its head and closes its powerful hooked bill onto its throat, its struggles weaken and its cries soften until its grip on its world becomes distant and intangible. It is over quickly for the gmu, and seconds after it ever knew it was being hunted, all goes dark and peaceful. Soon, only the noisy crunching of bone and cartilage and tearing of muscle and sinew percolate through the once lively wood, as the birds flutter to distant branches and the tribbets scurry away to safety, to avoid the same fate.

above: the terror glove, apex predator of the Serinarctan forest 250 million years PE

~~~

The hunter is a massive creature, similar in basic form to her prey, though almost twice his weight and half again as tall. She is a tall bipedal avian, nine feet tall at the head, with a stocky build. As she feeds with her head hidden down in the dense undergrowth, she is unremarkable, a shaggy brown and gray mottled creature that could pass at this angle for any of many large flightless birds - a moa, a serestrider, or an aardgoose. Once she stands to attention, though, she reveals herself to be a monstrous animal, a huge and naked, leathery hand-shaped head sitting atop her plain trunk, consisting of five jointed digits, each lined with two-inch-long keratin teeth and tipped with even larger talons. Between them, hidden in folds of flesh drooling with sticky, foul-smelling saliva, she carries a sinister hooked beak as long as a man's forearm - the tool with which she dispatches her prey after immobilizing it in a strangling embrace.

She is a descendant of the glove, one of a group of these awkward little burrowers known as grapplers, which have specialized as predators, using their finger-like snout appendages, which differ from the fleshy ones of the mittens and their descendants in being supported by bone and cartilage joints, to catch and subdue animal prey. She is the largest of them all, an apex predator weighing over a thousand pounds, whose kind hunts by ambush. She is perfectly at home here in the dense, fertile broad-leaf sunflower forests that dominate much south and central Serinarcta, where she trods almost silently on soft foot pads over the moist leaf litter. To hunt, she need only to creep low along the game trails made by the oret's large browsers as they move from feeding sites toward streams where they drink or the thickets in which they bed down, and allow her naturally striped and dappled pelage to blend in to the dappled light of the forest floor. Surrounded by bushes, lying prostrate on her belly, even this largest of softbill birds can vanish in plain sight until her prey comes to her. She is not picky, and will leap forward to capture anything which she can overpower, especially small birds and tribbets just a few pounds in weight. To truly feed her appetite, however, takes larger game - circuagodonts and her distant kin, the terries, such as the gnu and the polymorph.

The hand-shaped collection of appendages of her ancestor is not drastically modified in the terror glove, nor her smaller predatory kin, though the claw at the end of each finger has become very long and recurved and many pairs of others, smaller but equally sharp, have developed up along their lengths which serve to secure a tight grasp on struggling prey so that a killing bite can be delivered safely. All of the mantis-like fingers bend either downward or inward - none fully oppose, so to grab prey all five grab hold of the victim's neck from the side side and curve around, pulling the windpipe into direct contact with the beak that lies hidden beneath them. The digits, as they secure the head of the victim, protect the hunter's eyes from defensive bites, while she can additionally subdue large prey with a powerful, raking kick with her sturdy hind legs, each tipped in its own set of three savage talons.

~~~

The glove lineage of softbill birds, despite their highly derived facial anatomy, are primitive in regard to cognition. They are all substantially less intelligent on the whole than their mitten sister group, with brains that are proportionally small among the birds of Serina at this time. Relative to Earth birds in the Holocene, however, this still puts them at a higher than average level. Gloves are more intelligent than the ancestral canary, less so than rhyncheirids, or most sparrowgulls, and they are every bit as intelligent as they need to be to be highly effective predators. They are still very behaviorally complex, particularly in regard to courtship. The specialized behavior of males sealing their mates in burrows to raise their chicks has broken down as the grapplers have become larger, but the ancestral burrow-building behaviors performed by the male to attract a mate persist. The males of smaller, more basal grapplers still construct an underground den to draw in a mate, who chooses her partner based on his consturction's stability and size; the larger and more sturdy and protective the den is for her and her future young, particularly in regards to keeping out rain and having multiple escape routes, the more likely she is to find its maker attractive. But the grappler female also has a purely aesthetic sense - she likes a pretty home, not just a utilitarian one, and she is more apt to choose a mate if he has a good sense of style. Males that adorn the inside of their dens with pretty objects are more appealing than those who leave their dens barren, even if the barren nest is better constructed. Different species have different preferences, some really liking blue flowers, others bright green leaves, red stones, or even a glistening pearly white castle ornamented with carefully stripped-clean bones, and the males cater to these tastes, becoming interior decorators in addition to carpenters. Once a female settles down with a mate, both partners share the incubation duties and then raise the chicks together for a single breeding season, parting ways and usually pairing with a new mate the next season.

The terror glove is the only species too large to burrow at all, and it has thus the most divergent courtship behavior pattern. Instead of trying to dig a burrow in the ground big enough to accommodate an animal as large as himself, he instead digs and amasses the soil in sunny patch of forest into a large mound, up to twenty feed wide, which he then hollows out, forming a walled depression ten to fifteen feet wide surrounded by a sturdy wall of soil up to five feet high and five feet thick. He then proceeds to cover his construction with a roof of saplings broken down from the surrounding forest, planting their bases in the top of the wall and lining them up so that they come to rest together in the middle to form a ten-shaped ceiling over his nest, and then sealing them together with mud. After a month or so of hard work, taking up all of his waking hours not spent hunting, the result of his efforts is a massive, igloo-shaped above-ground house of soil and wooden supports with a single entrance tunnel topped with overhanging saplings. He lines the interior with soft leaf branches and grasses, as well as bones, moss, and anything else that catches his fancy in the process. He then sits at the entrance to his creation - a combination nest site (a huge above-ground burrow) and ornamental bower - and calls for the attention of the slightly larger females, which pass through the territories of several males, sampling their work. For the first several seasons that a male begins building, his work is not usually very good. His roof may leak, his walls may topple, and females are unlikely to be impressed. But if his creation is both sturdy and appeals to the female's sense of aesthetics, one might accept him and go on to lay her clutch of eggs in his bower, and the two will settle down to raise a family in their own private and secluded abode in the forest, where the chicks are well protected from predators and the weather. Females stay with a single male for only one breeding season and are nomadic. Males, on the other hand, are loyal to their territories and to their bowers, and will return to them every spring to repair any damage that occurred during the winter, to drag out old and dried nest linings and bring in new bushels of green branches, and to expand the structure outwards and upwards, so that after many years it becomes a raised castle twenty feet above the surrounding woods and up to fifty feet wide. These older males, with their larger structures, eventually become extremely appealing mates, to the point that females battle amongst themselves for the right to a top-quality male, as each one will only pair with one partner, as two mates would usually mean too many ravenous young to provide enough food for. A male will hold onto his territory for as long as he is physically in good condition, but eventually the time comes that a young challenger will usurp the long-term resident and take over his bower, instantly inheriting all the fame of his predecessor. Rivalry between males is intense, as there is so much to gain by taking over a more attractive male's territory, and fights are frequent and fierce; males quickly end up covered in scars inflicted as they wrestle with their clawed faces; whichever manages to pin the other down first is the winner. These battles are bloody and violent, but rarely fatal.

Young grapplers hatch out precocial, and are able to walk within a day of hatching, but do not feed themselves for several months and during this time must be fed by their parents. This occurs first at the nest site, with the chicks spending their time safely inside the den or the bower with one parent while the other alternates hunting, but eventually both parents will leave to hunt at once and around six months of age the chicks begin to follow and learn to hunt for themselves. Hunting is largely driven by instinctive motor patterns such as stalking and pouncing but the chicks must learn how to deliver a proper killing bite as well as to stalk secretly, using natural cover to blend into the background. Like mammals, the chicks play extensively together, practicing adult behaviors, from the age of a few days up to around ten months in age. They are independent before one year of age, when their parents will breed again. Most species will be fully grown in another year or two, but the much larger greater grappler is not fully grown for a full ten years. Even so, males of this species begin building practice bowers, which may consist of nothing more than piles of sticks, as young as age three, and both sexes are capable of breeding by the age of five, well before they reach their adult size.

Though the greater grappler is quite a bit larger than the other grappler species (which vary from fifty to two hundred pounds), its young reach self-sufficiency on a nearly identical time scale, differing in that they simply continue growing well past when their relatives will have ceased. They are also longer-lived, living well into their sixties if they can avoid accident or disease, as they have no natural predators of their own once fully grown.