Roadrunners

My husband and I were fortunate to be able to spend a few days last week visiting family in Palm Desert, California. Palm Desert is a beautiful oasis in Riverside County, a few hours east of Los Angeles. The weather there this time of year is gorgeous – 80 degrees, sunny, light breezes pretty much every day. Perfect weather for sitting out by a pool in the afternoon, which is mostly what we did! One afternoon, while engaged in this extremely pleasant activity, I looked over to the edge of the pool patio, and saw a funny little bird running underneath the shrubs. Lo and behold, it turned out to be a roadrunner.

I’ve never really thought about roadrunners that much (except, of course, for road runner in the Loony Tunes cartoon who always managed to get the best of Wile E. Coyote). But this was a neat looking bird. He had a long neck, a tuft on top of his head, and a very long tail. When he (or maybe a she, I don’t know exactly know what gender it was) walked or ran, his whole body went horizontal – head down, tail stretched out behind him. But when he stopped, his head came up, his tuft poofed out, and his tail rose up behind him. All in all, it was a very cute sight. I decided to investigate roadrunners a little bit more to see what I could find out about them.

A roadrunner is actually a kind of ground cuckoo. It is found in all of the southwestern states, but predominantly in the Mojave, Sonoran, Chihuahuan and south Great Basin deserts. Its prominent features include its tail and head (which I mentioned above), as well as its feet – it has 4 toes, 2 of which point forwards and 2 of which point backwards. The roadrunner can fly, and will do so if threatened or (apparently) if traveling downhill. But because it has a large body and weak wings, it can’t fly very well, so it usually prefers to walk or run. In fact, this little guy can run as fast as 17 to 19 miles per hour. (The fastest human in the world, incidentally, clocks in at around 22 miles per hour. But that’s for a distance of only 100 meters.)

The speed of this bird makes him well adapted to catching and eating other animals. Its diet consists almost exclusively of insects, scorpions, lizards, rodents, and other birds. They have been seen snatching dragonflies or hummingbirds out of air in mid-flight! They will eat fruit that they find on the ground, though, especially in the winter when prey becomes scarce. Roadrunners will even eat rattlesnakes – they are one of the few animals that can do this, actually. To catch this very dangerous snake without getting bit, the roadrunner will dart around, snatch the snake up by the tail, and whip it repeatedly against the ground until it’s dead. And here’s a funny tidbit that I happened across. A roadrunner will eat its prey whole; however, they have been know to catch snakes too big to eat in one sitting. So they will swallow as much as they can, then run around for a while with the rest of the snake dangling out of their mouths until the eaten bit has digested enough to make room for the rest of it! (Yuck.)

Interestingly enough, as long as the food that the roadrunner eats is high enough in moisture, the bird does not even need to drink any additional water. They also have special glands around their eyes that secrete extra salt from their bodies. This makes them very well adapted to living in the desert.

And no, they do not really say “beep beep” whenever they stop. Their vocalizations consist of a much more normal, bird-like cooing or whirring. The "beep beep" is, unfortunately, only in the cartoons.