The size and long necks were likely a food-driven adaptation - to reach high-hanging nuts, shoots and fruits. The loss of flight was consequential BUT the long neck and large size counter-balanced it, giving them a survival advantage.
So, a bird which could fly, grew larger in order to reach food that it couldn't reach? Even though it could fly, it needed long legs to reach nuts that were in trees. Right. And then it lost the ability to fly, because it had to grow larger to reach things which were in the air... Right.
This is assuming that their habitat is exclusively jungle. Remember that there are also open plains and hilly grasslands near the town. In any case height (and thus the ability to see over undergrowth at nearby and more distant hazards remains an advantage, even in the forest.
Height is an advantage, but size isn't. The larger you are, the more you need to eat. Even if they travel out into the plains or grasslands, they live in the forest/a cave, both places where the height advantage would be minimal next to the huge increase in food consumption that they would need.
Wrong again. This adaptation increases the birds' survival chances as they are no longer specialised to a certain type of food and thus can handle environmental changes. In the real world, specialists (like the panda) always do poorly compared to generalists (like the raccoon).
Ignoring your 'Always' to describe an extremely large set of examples, (Pretty much nothing with thousands of variables is 'Always' one way or another,) the problem isn't that they developed a way to eat multiple food sources, but that the developments both hinder each other. One evolution actively detracts from the other, based off of the order that it would have had to adapt in.
How can an Elephant be so huge? How can a Rhino be so huge? How can an Ultrasaurus be the single largest life-form ever to walk the Earth all despite being pure herbivores?
I already brought up Elephants and Rhinos briefly, but I'll talk more about them 'cause why not? First off, they are huge because they actually need to fight off predators. Predators which they actually have, unlike this bird. They grow large enough to fight off predators, they don't grow so large that they are never, ever hunted. They also don't settle down in a single area which they would have to return to every night after roaming for food. Not to mention, their natural environments are one where their size actually does give them a large advantage at seeing threats. Another important note: They have babies infrequently, and not in large quantities. Alice clearly says 'Nesting season' and 'Chicks'. This means that 1, they nest and mate annually and 2, they have more than one chick at a time. Unless most or all of their chicks die every year and they only get a survivor occasionally, (which would be extremely strange,) their size would lead to them having a population issue very quickly. They have no natural predators, they take a lot of food to survive, and they have multiple children every year. It doesn't make sense.
As for the Ultrasaurus, I've read speculation that extremely prehistoric times may have had a higher oxygen content in the air, allowing creatures to grow larger than would be possible nowadays. I don't know a lot about dinosaurs, though, so definitely don't quote me on this, and I can't say a lot else on the subject.
Real life biological adaptations don't 'line up' either. Real world biology is always messier and less prone to human linear logic than theoreticians would like.
And here's where I stop talking about biology and start talking about writing.
There's a rule of thumb for authors when writing a story: Your job is harder than God's. In real life, a long string of coincidences can lead to good or bad things happening. A non sequitor can come in out of the blue, saving the day, and nobody will say it couldn't happen because it actually just happened. The craziest or most insane coincidences can happen, and that's okay. In a story, though, everything has to make sense in a way that the reader can understand, and nothing should come out of the blue. (With exceptions. If you're writing absurdest works or a comedy, it's sometimes okay, but never when it's part of an actual plot or drama. The other exception is when starting your story: Conflict can be started by a character winning the lottery, but it should never be resolved by their winning the lottery.) Plot points can't come out of nowhere, important subplots can't be dropped or forgotten, and what the author says has to make sense. If you want to create a fictional creature, great. Go ahead. If you want to then try and explain the anthropology of the fictional creature, though,
it has to make sense. If an author brings up a topic and takes that topic seriously, then they have to be prepared for the audience to take the topic seriously.
An author should
never rely on handwaving or 'It's okay because it doesn't make sense in real life.' (Jeph hasn't done this, I'm not criticizing him for it, I'm just saying this as a rule of writing.) Fans shouldn't have to use this defense, either. It's not a large issue here, because I don't think the plot is going to heavily rely on the bird's anthropology or the audience's knowledge and understanding of it, but that doesn't mean it should be defended because we can't explain everything in real life.
Again, if Jeph had just written: They're harmless, don't worry about it, then the setup would be fine because it'd be clear that their evolutionary history doesn't matter. Because he brought it up, though, it's fair game to talk about.
Poll
