D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February 2010
The Roadrunner
Page: 2Habitat and Diet
In the Southwest, the non-migratory Roadrunner makes its residence year-round in the open brushlands of desert basins and in the pion and juniper woodlands of mountain foothills. Omnivorous and opportunistic, notes Hughes, it feeds on "insects, spiders, scorpions, centipedes, millipedes, lizards, small snakes, birds, eggs, rodents, carrion [and] plant material." It much prefers wildlife (mostly insects), which makes up 90% of its diet through the spring, summer and fall seasons. It relies on its diet to meet most of its needs for water. Its digestive system seems impervious to the poisons of any venomous prey. Contrary to some reports, the Roadrunner takes only a small toll on the quail population.
An astonishingly quick and clever predator, the bird forages by alternately walking or running and pausing and scanning. Using its powerful bill as a trap and a weapon, it can snatch insects in mid-flight. It seizes scorpions by the tail, disabling the stinger, says Hughes. It clubs small rodents to death by striking them with its bill at the base of the skull.
The Roadrunner seizes larger prey — for instance, reptiles and rodents — by the tip of the tail, and swinging them, whip-like, through a "vertical, extended, oval-shaped trajectory ending in a downward accelerating slam against substrate," such as hard ground, a log or a stone surface. The fierce beating "disarticulates the prey's skeleton," writes Hughes, "elongating and narrowing the carcass to facilitate swallowing." The Roadrunner can swallow a two-foot-long snake, head first, in a matter of minutes.
The bird does, in fact, kill rattlesnakes, according to numerous accounts. A ranch hand told Dobie that he saw a Roadrunner take on a rattlesnake in a cattle pen: "The bird in its maneuvers raised a great amount of dust. With wings extended and dragging in the dust, it would run at the snake, aiming at its head. The snake struck blindly, several times hitting the paisano's wings, without effect, of course. Finally, the bird pecked a hole in the snake's head and punctured the brain," killing the reptile.
Occasionally, however, a Roadrunner may overreach. One in a desert park near our home in Las Cruces stole a recently hatched Mockingbird from its nest, drawing the wrath of the parents. The Roadrunner ran for its life to escape the flogging and pecking. It did not, however, give up its prize.
Behavior and Life Cycle
Roadrunners, which bond for life, engage in an elaborate spring courtship near a prospective nest site, according to Hughes. They chase each other, both in runs and flights, through open brush. The male may take an elevated perch, issuing a "coo" call (which sounds to me like a lonesome puppy's whine). The male or the female may approach a mate, not with a flower bouquet, but with a romantic stick. The male may run a short distance from the female with his wings and tail raised, snapping his wings against his body. Or he may face the female, wagging his tail and bowing his head. In addition to a stick, he may offer her a delicacy such as a grasshopper, lizard or snake. The female, by now enchanted with his debonair behavior, raises her crest and tail feathers, signaling her readiness to mate, a process that ends within moments. The female eats her delicacy, and the two walk away casually in opposite directions.
Typically, the couple chooses a nest site in a thicket of desert shrubs, cacti or small trees, preferably one with a diversity of plant and potential prey species. They may locate the nest near a dry streambed or pathway that serves as a route for transporting twigs for nest construction and food for nestlings. The male delivers the twigs. The female takes the lead in building the nest, sometimes fussing crossly at the male if he slacks off in his job. She uses the twigs to fashion a saucer-shaped, one- to one-and-one-half-foot diameter nest and lines it, says Hughes, with leaves, grass, feathers, mesquite bean pods and even snakeskin.
Over the course of perhaps a week to 10 days, the female lays, typically, four to six sub-elliptical to elliptical white eggs, each approximately an inch and a half in length. The male takes primary responsibility for incubating the eggs at night, while the female takes the daylight hours. Dedicated parents, they share responsibility for feeding and protecting their young, which hatch within just under three weeks. They feed their nestlings primarily on insects at first, then on small lizards and snakes. The Roadrunner may, writes Stan Tekiela in his Birds of New Mexico Field Guide, perform "a distraction display to protect the nest" from predatory threats. If a nestling fails to develop properly, however, one of the parents may toss it into the air and gobble it up.
Coaxed by their parents, the young Roadrunners, fledging rapidly, begin leaving the nest when they reach two to three weeks old, remaining close to home and foraging with their parents for a month or more before they set out on an independent life. Far-ranging for ground birds, they may take up a new home several miles from their birth nest. Meanwhile, the parents may raise a second brood later in the year. The Roadrunner may reproduce for perhaps six years, and it may live for seven or eight years.
Life's Hazards
The Roadrunner, including its eggs and nestlings, may suffer predation by raccoons, raptors and even feral cats. The male and female as well as the most robust nestlings may cannibalize puny nestlings, or they may cast them from the nest. The parents also lose nestlings to unseasonable weather and to food shortages.
Roadrunners and Poets
In the Southwest, the Roadrunner has long drawn the attention not only of
storytellers, but also of poets. As Eve Ganson (quoted by Dobie) wrote in her "Desert
Mavericks," for example:
The Road-Runner runs in the road,
His coat is speckled, la mode.
His wings are short, his tail is long,
He jerks it as he runs along.
His bill is sharp, his eyes are keen,
He has a brain tucked in his bean.
But in his gizzard — if you please —
Are lizards, rats and bumble bees;
Also horned toads — on them he feeds —
And rattlesnakes! and centipedes!
Given its character, the Roadrunner will, I suspect, continue to claim the attention of Southwesterners for a long time to come.
Jay W. Sharp is a Las Cruces author who is a regular contributor to
DesertUSA, an Internet magazine, and who is the author of Texas Unexplained. To read all his guides to birds of the Southwest, see www.desertexposure.com/birds