The Snowscrounger

Serinaustra, the south polar continent of Serina in the Ultimocene, was once a thriving and productive land, full of varied habitats and countless endemic plants and animals.

That all changed in the last few million years, as the cooling climate snuffed out virtually everything beneath snow and ice, which soon compacted into massive glaciers which covered the continent from east to west. While Serinarcta stretched just far enough into equatorial latitudes to remain marginally habitable, Serinaustra’s location around the moon’s south pole meant that it has now frozen all but completely. A nearly lifeless desert, what little life it does support is dependent upon the nearby ocean. During the summer both marine molodonts and a wide variety of seabirds still visit the coastal edges of the massive glacier to raise their young in large colonies, using the continent’s barren nature to their advantage. For in the middle Ultimocene, Serinaustra is basically a frozen wasteland, habitable only to migratory life during the short summer season, with basically all of its once numerous native land animals extinct.

All except one.

It skulks along the edges of the summer breeding colonies, an unassuming animal, short and stocky, about as big as a farm turkey. Its pelage, which covers it head to toe, is immaculately clean and white, letting it hide in plain sight against the ice if it tucks its grey facial tentacles out of sight into its feathers. It darts in and out of the crowds, heads low to the ground, looking for any opportunity to procure a meal. It is an appealing looking animal, fluffy and with big round eyes, but its behavior is less so. It seeks out anything vaguely edible and greedily gobbles up the dead and the rotting, and snatches stillborn infants (and unattened living ones, if it can). It steals briefly unattended eggs, and even consumes the abundant feces of other animals. The snowscrounger cannot afford to be picky about what it eats. Food is only available here for less than half of the year. For unlike every other creature that still lives on Serinaustra, the snowscrounger can neither swim well nor fly. It must remain through the harsh and barren winter; it is exiled, trapped here as its world slowly changed from one green and full of life to one cold and empty. Yet these same circumstances, which it has survived where no other has, have forged it into one of Serina’s most tenacious animals, with an admirable will to live.

above: on the ice sheets of Serinaustra, a family of snowscroungers find a stillborn molodont pup, but will have to fight a hungry giant glacier raven for it - and the raven is calling for backup.

The snowscrounger is the single living descendent of the squork, a relatively primitive terrie, and besides the much more successful trunkos, it is the only such representative of this group of ground-dwelling tentacled birds still living. Its opportunistic omnivory and beach-combing habits saved it as the continent froze over, as this intelligent and pragmatic animal found new food sources to exploit to stay alive. Today Serinaustra is almost completely ice, with only a few rocky peninsulas along its northernmost coasts, and the snowscrounger lives right upon the glacier, rarely if ever feeling soil beneath its feathered feet. It drinks by crushing and eating ice, and must collect an entire years’ worth of food during the short breeding season, storing huge quantities of scraps and refuse in the ice to dig up and rely on through the winter when they are left marooned upon the continent as every single other animal leaves for warmer regions. This incredibly harsh living situation has crafted them into a very smart, very sly animal, well-adapted to take what it needs from others, both by making use of resources no other animal wants, and by tricking and stealing food literally from the mouths of others.

The snowscrounger is more agile than the large, hulking molodonts and flightless penguin-like sparrowgulls that breed here, and it knows it. It is also smarter. When molodont mothers regurgitate food for their pups, the snowscrounger sneaks in, pushes the pup aside and steals a mouthful of nutritious milk-like stomach secretion before the mother realizes and cuts off the supply. When the pretenguins return from the sea with crops full of semi-digested fish, the snowscrounger knows they will vomit up some of the excess weight to escape if they are sufficiently harassed, and pairs of them will work together to beat them up until they do, throwing chunks of ice at the birds to force them into spilling some of their food. They are even capable of complex tool use and active predation; one member of a pair will bite the rump of a new mother clamcracker repeatedly until she turns around in rage, at which time the other runs in and skewers her newborn on sharpened bone, and drags it away for both to kill and eat. They must spend all day, every day during the short breeding season procuring food - any kind of food - and stashing it to last the winter because all too quickly, they will find themselves the only living thing on the entire continent for another six months.

Yet they are far from the only animal that scavenges the breeding colonies, as large and aggressive flying birds such as the giant glacier raven - a skua-like sparrowgull - also arrive with the summer and compete for the same resources. They are the snowscrounger’s mortal enemies, animals that have the option to fly away yet still spend the summer here taking what little food is available to the scrounger, and the two birds are in almost constant conflict. Glacier ravens steal from the larders of snowscroungers, and snowscroungers are smart enough to orchestrate premeditated murder of the pesky birds, plotting for days, sometimes weeks ways to ambush and kill them with tools. But the raven, too, is smart enough to avoid these plots, and is able to cooperate in larger social groups than the snowscrounger to gang up on and overwhelm them. Either species can and will kill the other given the right circumstance, which balances their dynamic with just enough mutual caution that it ensures neither totally exterminates the other.

The snowscrounger breeds only every three years, incubates its eggs on its own feathered feet, and hatches a singular chick which the parents alternately carry around until it is well-grown and able to withstand the cold. The chick relies on its parents for at least two and usually takes three years to learn all its need to survive in this wasteland, so the most common group number seen is three. There simply isn’t enough food to breed more often, but besides mutual enmity with the glacier raven, the snowscrounger has no natural predators on the barren continent, and so most adults can live a long time.

The snowscrounger has beat all the odds in surviving the freezing of Serinaustra. For the time being, it is a remarkable exception to the ongoing trend. Though it is the last species of its line, unlike so many others, the population of this one is - at least for now - stable and not at risk of extinction. Having adapted as well as it possibly could to life in such a precarious place, the snowscrounger is a fighter. It won’t go down easily.