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Beep! Beep! Roadrunner
Last updated on Wednesday, January 01, 2003
Roadrunners fascinate me - not the cartoon ones, the real flesh and blood birds, two feet long from the tip of their graceless tail to their flashy crest. They strut the dry corners of my yard on long, bare legs, spearing insects and lizards with their sharp beaks, the sun glinting from their speckled black and white plumage. In his book The Desert Year, Joseph Wood Krutch wrote: "This is the roadrunner's country, no other life, not even a spiny cactus or a resinous creosote bush, better says 'desert.'"
Road Runner Photo courtesy Byron Wright New Mexico Cooperative Extension Service. I agree. Our state bird, a ground-dwelling speedster, is superbly adapted to desert conditions, thriving despite scarce water, fierce summer heat, chill winters, wide day-to-night temperature swings, and food armed with spines, venom and stinging hairs.
Roadrunners use sophisticated technology to cope with the harsh climate. Unlike other year-round desert residents, they remain active through both hot and cold months. Each morning last winter, one perched on our fence with its back turned to the sun, dropped its tail, spread its wings, and lifted the speckled feathers on its back, exposing a "solar panel" of jet black skin. By heating their bodies with solar energy, roadrunners reduce their caloric needs by as much as 40 percent. During hot late-summer days, I see the roadrunner only in the cooler morning and evening. Since birds cannot sweat, it takes to the shade during mid-day and compresses its plumage to retain less heat. When air temperatures climb above their 100+ body temperature, roadrunners, like humans, turn to evaporative cooling: they vibrate their throat lining to move air past the moist tissues in their respiratory systems; the resultant evaporation cools their bodies from within.
Roadrunners' speed and agility allows them to catch venomous tarantulas, scorpions and centipedes without harming themselves; they also eat insects, lizards, small birds, cactus fruit and seeds. They rarely fly, instead sprinting as fast as 15 miles per hour across the desert. The roadrunner that I watch often catches lizards in our garden, snatching them and, since it lacks teeth, swallowing them whole. What doesn't fit hangs out of its mouth (like a child eating spaghetti!), the excess swallowed as the first digests. It also plucks dog food from a dish in the neighbor's yard.
To encourage these desert characters to visit your yard, cultivate untidiness: leave tall "weeds" or native shrubs for shade, and build a small rock pile to attract lizards for them to hunt. (A tidy, manicured yard lacks habitat for many of the things that wildlife eat.) Also, keep your pets inside or corralled in other parts of the yard. If you are lucky, wildness, in the form of the roadrunner's curious stalking strut, will grace your yard.
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