Columns

My first roadrunner encounter was at my grandmother’s funeral in Arkansas. Well, not at the funeral as such; I had snuck off into the woods behind a cousin’s house for a discreet smoke during the post-funeral dinner. When the outlandish bird came strolling through, we were mutually startled. We made eye contact, but the roadrunner didn’t panic. It flicked its tail a couple of times and kept on going. 

This roadrunner, AKA paisano, chaparral cock, lizard bird, snake killer, and other epithets, was near the eastern edge of its mostly Southwestern range, and I was about at the western extent of mine, never having gotten beyond Tulsa. But that was about to change: I was a month away from Berkeley, if the draft didn’t get me first. It was kind of a liminal state, now that I recall it. (And I don’t mean Arkansas, which can be liminal in its own way.) 

I’ve met a number of roadrunners since then, mainly in Southern California, Arizona, and Texas (home of the world’s largest roadrunner, “Paisano Pete,” a statue in Fort Stockton) and have come to realize that, genius that he was, the Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones got the bird all wrong. It doesn’t go “beep.” It coos like a dove, yelps like a coyote, whirs, whines, and clacks its bill; but no beep. And there’s nothing remotely cute about it. Like pelicans and hornbills, roadrunners make the dinosaur-bird connection obvious. They’re a bit sinister in appearane. That fits their behavior: as a dedicated predator, the roadrunner has more than a little in common with its cartoon adversary. 

Although they’ve been known to eat prickly pear fruit after rubbing the spines off, roadrunners subsist mainly on insects and other arthropods and smaller vertebrates. Each prey item requires a different approach. Scorpions are seized by the tail and bashed against a rock; horned lizards are swallowed head first and dorsal side up so their head spines don’t get stuck in the bird’s throat. They kill rattlesnakes by dancing around them like Muhammad Ali and pecking them in the head; the legend that they surround the rattlers with cholla-joint corrals is unsubstantiated. 

Roadrunners also snatch hummingbirds and small passerines from feeders, take young purple martins from their condos, and raid the mist nets of bird banders. There’s one account of a roadrunner leaping out of an arroyo and downing a low-flying white-throated swift. George M. Sutton, the artist/ornithologist, got the story from a Reverend St. John O’Sullivan of the San Juan Capistrano Mission, so you might want to take it with a grain of salt. 

Yes, they have their comical side. They appear to be made of spare parts: Elliott Coues described them as “cuckoos compounded of a chicken and a magpie.” (It was Coues who complained that oystercatchers were poorly named because “oysters do not run fast.”) William L. Dawson pointed to the roadrunner as proof “that the Almighty has a sense of humor.” 

Properly speaking, our bird is the greater roadrunner. The smaller but similar lesser roadrunner is endemic to Mexico and Central America. Both are members of the cuckoo family, part of a clade of ground-dwelling New World species. Although Old World cuckoos are notorious brood parasites, roadrunners are model parents: they form long-term pair bonds, and both male and female incubate the eggs and tend to the young. They are typical cuckoos only in having zygodactyl feet: two toes forward, two back. 

A few weeks ago Ron and I watched a pair in the hills south of Livermore. They were walking through the short grass, one a few yards in the lead, apparently bill-clacking at each other; we couldn’t hear them, but their mandibles were moving. They seemed to be scouting for prey. According to the invaluable Birds of North America site, they’d be a mated pair that did not yet have eggs or nestlings, after which they would split up their territory and forage separately. At one point one of the birds—the sexes are identical in size and plumage—volplaned down the hillside, landing in a bush. Flight is not a roadrunner’s strong suit. Then he or she worked back up the slope where its partner was waiting, and the two disappeared over the crest of the hill. 

It may come as a surprise that the roadrunner is a Bay Area bird. The Alameda County Breeding Bird Atlas project documented a sparse permanent population in the southeastern part of the county. But they used to be much more widespread. Roadrunners once nested at Mount Diablo, and there are old records from the Berkeley and Oakland Hills, Palo Alto, and Mount Tamalpais. The species is another casualty of the region’s rampant development. Although roadrunners can become habituated to humans—Sutton says the bird “has a streak of domesticity in his nature” and relates a story of a pair that moved into a chicken house near Santa Fe—they don’t like being crowded. Our loss. 

My first roadrunner encounter was at my grandmother’s funeral in Arkansas. Well, not at the funeral as such; I had snuck off into the woods behind a cousin’s house for a discreet smoke during the post-funeral dinner. When the outlandish bird came strolling through, we were mutually startled. We made eye contact, but the roadrunner didn’t panic. It flicked its tail a couple of times and kept on going. 

This roadrunner, AKA paisano, chaparral cock, lizard bird, snake killer, and other epithets, was near the eastern edge of its mostly Southwestern range, and I was about at the western extent of mine, never having gotten beyond Tulsa. But that was about to change: I was a month away from Berkeley, if the draft didn’t get me first. It was kind of a liminal state, now that I recall it. (And I don’t mean Arkansas, which can be liminal in its own way.) 

I’ve met a number of roadrunners since then, mainly in Southern California, Arizona, and Texas (home of the world’s largest roadrunner, “Paisano Pete,” a statue in Fort Stockton) and have come to realize that, genius that he was, the Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones got the bird all wrong. It doesn’t go “beep.” It coos like a dove, yelps like a coyote, whirs, whines, and clacks its bill; but no beep. And there’s nothing remotely cute about it. Like pelicans and hornbills, roadrunners make the dinosaur-bird connection obvious. They’re a bit sinister in appearane. That fits their behavior: as a dedicated predator, the roadrunner has more than a little in common with its cartoon adversary. 

Although they’ve been known to eat prickly pear fruit after rubbing the spines off, roadrunners subsist mainly on insects and other arthropods and smaller vertebrates. Each prey item requires a different approach. Scorpions are seized by the tail and bashed against a rock; horned lizards are swallowed head first and dorsal side up so their head spines don’t get stuck in the bird’s throat. They kill rattlesnakes by dancing around them like Muhammad Ali and pecking them in the head; the legend that they surround the rattlers with cholla-joint corrals is unsubstantiated. 

Roadrunners also snatch hummingbirds and small passerines from feeders, take young purple martins from their condos, and raid the mist nets of bird banders. There’s one account of a roadrunner leaping out of an arroyo and downing a low-flying white-throated swift. George M. Sutton, the artist/ornithologist, got the story from a Reverend St. John O’Sullivan of the San Juan Capistrano Mission, so you might want to take it with a grain of salt. 

Yes, they have their comical side. They appear to be made of spare parts: Elliott Coues described them as “cuckoos compounded of a chicken and a magpie.” (It was Coues who complained that oystercatchers were poorly named because “oysters do not run fast.”) William L. Dawson pointed to the roadrunner as proof “that the Almighty has a sense of humor.” 

Properly speaking, our bird is the greater roadrunner. The smaller but similar lesser roadrunner is endemic to Mexico and Central America. Both are members of the cuckoo family, part of a clade of ground-dwelling New World species. Although Old World cuckoos are notorious brood parasites, roadrunners are model parents: they form long-term pair bonds, and both male and female incubate the eggs and tend to the young. They are typical cuckoos only in having zygodactyl feet: two toes forward, two back. 

A few weeks ago Ron and I watched a pair in the hills south of Livermore. They were walking through the short grass, one a few yards in the lead, apparently bill-clacking at each other; we couldn’t hear them, but their mandibles were moving. They seemed to be scouting for prey. According to the invaluable Birds of North America site, they’d be a mated pair that did not yet have eggs or nestlings, after which they would split up their territory and forage separately. At one point one of the birds—the sexes are identical in size and plumage—volplaned down the hillside, landing in a bush. Flight is not a roadrunner’s strong suit. Then he or she worked back up the slope where its partner was waiting, and the two disappeared over the crest of the hill. 

It may come as a surprise that the roadrunner is a Bay Area bird. The Alameda County Breeding Bird Atlas project documented a sparse permanent population in the southeastern part of the county. But they used to be much more widespread. Roadrunners once nested at Mount Diablo, and there are old records from the Berkeley and Oakland Hills, Palo Alto, and Mount Tamalpais. The species is another casualty of the region’s rampant development. Although roadrunners can become habituated to humans—Sutton says the bird “has a streak of domesticity in his nature” and relates a story of a pair that moved into a chicken house near Santa Fe—they don’t like being crowded. Our loss.