Greater Roadrunners: tough and supremely adapted birds

Jon Hammond.

A Greater Roadrunner perches on a lichen-encrusted fencepost in the Tehachapi Valley.

One of the coolest, most interesting birds in the Tehachapi area is also one of the hardiest: the Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus).

These comical, animated birds are not only fast and fearless enough to kill and eat rattlesnakes, they do not migrate, so they must also be able to withstand the harshest Tehachapi weather.

Roadrunners are large birds, nearly two feet in length with long tails and long stout bills with a subtle hook at the end. Their overall plumage is a mix of black and white, with lots of light and dark streaks and speckling.

Their long, expressive tails constitute about half of their total body length and the tail feathers are primarily dark with green iridescence. The tips of the tail feathers have been dipped in white.

Among their many interesting qualities, roadrunners have a head crest comprised of dark feathers with the same greenish sheen as the tail feathers. This dark crest is speckled with white, and roadrunners can raise and lower it depending on their mood. A roadrunner can almost look like two different birds depending upon whether its crest is up or not - they look much more docile when it is down, but return to familiar ferocity when it is fully raised.

Roadrunners also possess a narrow band of colored skin that extends back a couple inches from their eyes. This bare area is mostly powder blue beginning at the eye and then ends with an orangish or reddish spot furthest from the bird's eye. This is an optional signaling area that roadrunners can flash if they want attention, like in the presence of a potential mate, or conceal with feathers if they want to keep a low profile with predators nearby.

I've spent time watching foraging roadrunners, and they will raise and lower their crests and flash their eye patches many times in the span of a few minutes. They will also frequently raise their active tails at a steep angle and then slowly let them descend.

Roadrunners derive their common name for their tendency to run rather than fly. In the desert, they routinely patrol dirt roads in search of reptilian prey, and that is the source of their name. However, that does not mean that roadrunners remain flat-footed on the ground: they run and hop and glide over rocks, shrubs and broken ground, and they often pause to survey their surroundings from the vantage point of a boulder, fencepost, tree limb or cactus branch.

The Nuwä (Kawaiisu or Southern Paiute) Indian word for roadrunner is iyip, pronounced "eye-YIP" with the accent on the second syllable, and these birds were commonly encountered in the Nuwä world. Roadrunners were admired and liked for their tendency to prey upon venomous snakes. One Tehachapi Indian matriarch, Clara Girado Williams, was nicknamed "Iyip" because she was as active and busy as a roadrunner.

Jon Hammond.

A roadrunner with its tail up, a common pose for them. Roadrunners have very long, expressive tails, and they often raise them up and down.

In Spanish, roadrunners are commonly called "paisano," which literally means "of the same country" or "of the same nation," and it translates to "countryman" or "fellow traveler." It serves as a friendly way of acknowledging the birds, and the fact that they are year-round residents of the landscape.

Roadrunners have their toes arranged in a "two-forward, two-back" pattern which leaves a distinctive footprint, about the size of a chicken's, whose toes are in a "three-forward, one back" configuration. The narrow X-shaped footprint of a Roadrunner makes it harder to tell which way they are traveling, and Pueblo Indians have incorporated this as a design element, using this symbol to avoid evil, since spirits would have difficulty determining which direction Roadrunners are heading.

Although roadrunners are limited mostly to the Southwest, almost all Americans are somewhat familiar with them thanks to the Looney Tunes cartoons featuring characters called the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.

This cartoon series was first created for Warner Brothers in 1948 by animation director Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese. There's practically no dialogue, and in that way the cartoons are similar to early silent movies, with their reliance on sight gags and comic adventures.

Of course, one bit of dialogue, or sound at least, is the cartoon Road Runner's iconic call, which is often rendered as "Beep! Beep!" Original voice actor Paul Julian preferred that the call be written as "Mheep! Mheep!" which is a closer approximation of the sound that Julian made.

In actuality, roadrunners make some interesting sounds, but nothing like the cartoon version. One of their main songs is a lovely, clear cooing or hooting, which is appropriate since roadrunners are members of the cuckoo family.

Roadrunners can also make some strange noises, including bill clacking that sounds like the staccato rattle of a cordless drill.

Although Wile E. Coyote never succeeds in capturing the speedy Road Runner, actual coyotes do pose a threat to real roadrunners, since coyotes at top speed can reach about 40 miles an hour, twice as fast as actual roadrunners can run.

Roadrunners have a varied diet that includes insects, the eggs and young of birds, small rodents, spiders, scorpions, fruit and, of course, lizards and snakes. Whatever they eat they tend to pound senseless first, which is how they kill snakes: they seize the head end first and then slam the reptile on the ground repeatedly. Anything they eat is digested and they don't expel pellets of bones, fur and teeth like raptors do.

Roadrunners are found throughout the Tehachapi area, from Bear Valley to Sand Canyon. Though reptiles are not their only food source, I've only found roadrunners in areas where reptiles where present - if lizards are absent, it seems like roadrunners probably will be as well.

As mentioned before, they don't migrate. They occupy the same territory year-round, and when storms hit, roadrunners simply hunker down, usually in dense foliage, and wait until the weather improves.

It has been said that "Dinosaurs didn't become extinct, they just grew feathers and got smaller," meaning of course that the fearsome reptiles of Earth's earlier history evolved into the approximately 10,000 bird species that now inhabit our planet. Greater Roadrunners, with their intensity, hardiness and predatory nature, are one of the best examples to illustrate this saying.

Keep enjoying the beauty of life in the Tehachapi Mountains.

Jon Hammond is a fourth generation Kern County resident who has photographed and written about the Tehachapi Mountains for 38 years. He lives on a farm his family started in 1921, and is a speaker of Nuwä, the Tehachapi Indian language. He can be reached at [email protected].