The Dodoesant

On Serina as on Earth, islands are hotspots of unique biodiversity. Serina's flying birds reach isolated lands easily and evolve quickly into strange and wonderful forms. Oftentimes marooned island birds become naive, fat and flightless as a result of a lack of predator pressures. If enemies reach their havens naturally or through other means, such species are highly vulnerable. The archetypical example of such an island bird is the dodo, a humongous pigeon too large to fly, whose flesh and eggs were rapidly was eaten to extinction by sailors, pigs and rats shortly after its discovery on the island of Mauritius in the 17th century.

But not every island species is defenseless against predators. Serinan sparrowgulls, birds which carry their eggs away from predators in their wings, are far better adapted to protect their developing young from carnivores either native or recently introduced than modern Earth birds. Though the vast majority of these birds are small and flighted species, Serina's Meridian Islands are home to many examples of unique flightless sparrowgulls, which range from rather small to more than one hundred pounds. These birds, descended from small, lost travelers caught off course on their migrations tens of millions of years ago, have diversified on this island in place of the trunkos or circuagodonts which normally fulfill such niches as large browsers and grazers on the mainland.

All of the sparrowgulls lift and carry their eggs under their wings or between their wrists - sometimes between their talons, though this is more unusual - if their nests are threatened; this behavior lets them avoid enemies which would raid a conventional birds nest as soon as they frightened off the mother. But only on the meridians have some sparrowgulls, the pitpockets, forgone the nest entirely and evolved to brood their eggs entirely while carrying them. We have already seen that species however; today we are focusing on a more basal relative of the pitpocket, another terrestrial sparrowgull which still nests on the ground. Similar in appearance to the earlier ancestor of the pitpocket, this species retains a slightly more primitive seabird-like anatomy including a less atrophied salt-ejecting gland in each nostril, giving it a tube-nosed appearance. Rather plump, with a long hooked bill, it closely resembles the dodo bird and has evolved to feed on similar food sources found in the temperate rainforest - fallen fruit, large seeds, and a variety of hard-shelled crustaceans are all eagerly consumed by this apparent proxy, swallowed whole. Males are somewhat more colorful than females, with steel blue head and tail feathers, though both sexes sport a clear white cheek pouch, yellow legs and a red belly. Both sexes are quite bold and flamboyant, performing courtship rituals in duet involving energetic leaps and lots of feather shaking to affirm lifelong pair bonds.

Unlike the dodo however, the dodoesant is not naive to predators. When initially threatened, these birds will erect their plumage, snap their bills, and threaten their predator quite fearlessly. If it is a small animal they may even attack it, bloodying or rarely even killing it with bludgeoning blows of their powerful beaks. But the dodoesant is not dumb; it knows when it is outmatched, and if faced by a larger persistent threat they will instead pick up their eggs or chicks, abandon the nest completely, and bolt away at speeds of up to thirty miles per hour on their extraordinarily sturdy, long legs, something a dodo could only dream of doing. It is so that the dodoesant, so similar in niche to the dodo, is almost its opposite in that it is very well-adapted to avoiding its predators, even relatively newly-introduced ones such as the predator tribbats. Though it is only because of the relative isolation of the Meridians that the sparrowgulls have been able to become large ground-dwelling birds in such diversity, they have by and large remained as intelligent and capable as their ancestors, and so thwarted the "dumb as a dodo" trope that affects the vast majority of island wildlife elsewhere outside this particularly unique island chain.