Hybrids, Loretober Day Twenty-Nine!

(Read to the end to find out how harpy hunters came to be!)

Although Kree and Clara managed to create the exact circumstances needed to have their daughter Laurel, interspecies relationships that lead to viable children are actually quite rare in their time period.

Humans, harpies, merfolk, and the (now considered extinct) dragons in their base forms are unable to interbreed due to being too biologically different from one another. The only way to combat this incompatibility is through the magically biological change of at least one parent. For full-blooded dragons, they had the ability to shape shift their bodies to match their partner's. For harpies, males have the mating feather (though it having the potential to change the biology of their mate enough to reproduce this is seen as more of a myth than absolute truth in Kree's time.). Neither humans nor merfolk have abilities that would allow them to become more compatible with others, so these groups, humans in particular due to being non-magical, are the least likely to form interspecies bonds.

Hybrids in Dracentra have always been either half-dragon or half-harpy. (This may change if I shove another intelligent species in this world but I don't have any real plans to as of now.) Half harpies like Laurel are sterile and are unable to create more hybrids, making them quite rare, but half-dragons/dragon shifters (if their draconic blood and shape shifting ability hasn't been thinned out too much) were able to successfully reproduce with a pureblood dragon, another dragon shifter, or the species their second parent was.

There was a time when dragon shifters were so common in the south that humans (wary of dragons or any magical creature destroying mankind) began to fear the people around them. This led to witch hunts and the persecution of hybrids of any kind, even people who could only grow a few draconic traits like horns/ tails (nicknamed daemons or demons) or half harpies who weren't at risk of creating more children. During this era, many hybrids had to go into hiding, concealing their hybrid traits, and thinning out their bloodlines until they became non-magical again.

This happened a long while before Kree and Clara's time to the point that humans no longer truly fear that any hybrids are among them, (though religious northern humans still see certain southerners as tarnished/sinful for potentially having magical ancestry, yippee not even fellow humans are safe from racism) but it created a strong aversion to making any sort of connection to magical species, even for trade. Being separated from each other this way for hundreds of years has caused humans to see harpies as less than people, even as dangerous beasts rather than an intelligent society. This dehumanization is why humans have decided to carve into harpy territory for resources, and why harpy hunting, in order to clear forest and thin retaliation numbers, has become more prevalent.