Greater Roadrunner: Myths, Meals & the Magic of the Desert

Hi everybody, welcome to Mark's Backyard Birds. Today I'm talking about a bird that probably almost everybody in the country knows, but very few have actually seen. Now of course you guys to the desert southwest, you get to enjoy them, but for the most of the country, and of course I'm talking about the greater roadrunner. For most of us it's a cartoon character from Saturday morning TV known for its beep beep and outrunning coyotes, Wile E. Coyote, and lightning fast, and all those things. But today we're going to learn about the truth about these greater roadrunners, where they live, and their mating habits, and what they eat, and all those kind of things. So this is a species profile requested from YouTube. So without further ado, let's get to the guest of honor. Yes, the greater roadrunner. Like I said, an unmistakable profile, and it is a ground cuckoo. For the rest of us, and the other parts of the country, the northern three-fourths or four-fifths of North America, we are more familiar with this cousins like the yellow-billed cuckoo and the black-billed cuckoo. They are related, but these are tree cuckoos, where the roadrunner is a ground cuckoo. Yes, it spends its life mostly on the ground running around, and it is also very much a desert bird. It has expanded its range, and we're going to talk about that in just a minute. But yes, it is truly adapted for dry desert environments. It has many adaptations that makes it to survive there. Examples are like, it gets most of its moisture from the food it eats, from the small mammals, and the insects, and the reptiles, and birds that they do eat. They are incredible predators, and while they are incredible predators, the old wily coyote thing truly is a myth. Coyotes are actually twice as fast as a cuckoo is, and they do pose a real threat to roadrunners. They can catch them and eat them, so they're a little reverse of the cartoon Saturday mornings, but they are very diverse in their diet. Like I said, they will eat seed and things in the winter months, but for the most part, they eat anything they can catch, and that is insects, mammals, reptiles, frogs, toads, anything that they can catch, and if they can catch it and consume it, they will eat it. Their range shows you very much that they are mainly at the desert southwest areas of the country in Mexico, up into the central valley of California. But one of the things, if we had this map pulled up from 50 years ago, it would look much smaller because they have been expanding their range for many years to the north and to the east. I mean, they range over almost into central Louisiana now and up through Arkansas and southern Missouri, so they have expanded range, and part of the reasons they're able to do that is because they are so adaptable and their diet is so diverse. While they're usually seen in grasslands and they are associated with desert scrub, they occur in woodlands now, and even the pine woodland, Bob Lolly Pine stands in Arkansas and in Louisiana, and then in Missouri, the live bird that I saw years ago was in northern Arkansas. I was out on the trip down there and we were driving home, and this roadrunner came running across the road in front of us between one, there was two pastures, a pasture on either side of us, and a little hedgerow there, and it came running out, ran right across the road in front of us, and I was like, oh my gosh, I had just moved here from North Carolina to Kansas City, and I guess I never really expected to see a roadrunner in Missouri, but I have since seen them in Missouri. Now, that was in just near the Missouri state line, so they are adaptable and they are fun to watch. People, I'm going to show you one example of how their habitat and how diverse they've become. This was taken in south Missouri, just sent into the Facebook group recently. Yes, this is a male roadrunner on someone's deck and the lawn furniture. This is not exactly what you expect to see, and you can see why I called the person by surprise, and they sent the picture in. So, but they do, they are very much ground animals, but when you see them elevated like this, you realize they do fly. They can fly. They do prefer to run everywhere they go, and running is, I mean, flying is kind of a last resort, and they're not very good flyers. They glide more than they actually fly, as I say, but I say that, and a friend of mine, birdwatching several years ago, was down in the Branson area of Missouri, southwest Missouri, and he heard this cuckoo, and when he knew it was a greater roadrunner, where he was at, and he looked up, he finally found it. It was up in the top of a 40-foot tall tree, and it was calling for a mate up there, and it's just not what you expect for roadrunners. You expect to be them down low, maybe up on a low perch, but they are truly entertaining. You would think for a bird to spend so much of his time on the ground that it would be a ground nesting species, but they're not. They actually nest up in trees, and they are maybe tall, smaller trees, but up off the ground, and we will often, as my friend saw in southern Missouri, them up high in a tree calling, and I'm going to play their call for you, and I use the Sibley Bird app for the other recordings, which come from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, give them credit for sure, and then most people think these are doves when they call, so listen to this call. Very dove-like, and then it slowed to send at the end, but that coo is very much, and even owl-like, you may think that, but it is similar, but that fade at the end, and they also make some chatter. That's actually their bills chattering like that, so the sound can alert you to their presence, but again, a lot of people will write them off as dove when they hear that sound, and the males are a little more colorful than the females. Visually, they're not that easy to tell apart unless you get a good look at them. The males do have taller crests. They tend to hold more erect, and they also, in the breeding season, when they're mate-attracting, they raise that crest, and it exposes that orange-type skin at the back of the blue eyestripe on them, and again, that is a lot for courtship, and they're kind of famous for their tail actions. Their scientific name is Geococcus californianus, so the Geococcus is your tailbone, and let me change back to this so you can see. They're quite famous for taking, rotating their tail around, geo around, and coccyx, their tailbone, so they twirl their feathers, their tail feathers, and a lot of times they'll raise them and lower them real slow, or raise them real slow, and that's where the name comes from, and it's a very typical behavior if you've got to see them. You know, while I talk about them being desert birds, they do occur in people's backyards, but not in really, they don't like really heavily urban areas, but they will snatch birds right off of bird feeders, hummingbirds. They'll snatch them right off of, when their neck bring on flowers, they'll jump up and grab them right out of the air. Like I said, if they can catch it, they'll eat it, so they are, you know, and of course, some of their nicknames is snake killer. They do eat snakes. You know, like I said, one of their nicknames is snake killer, and they eat venomous snakes. They don't have to, they seem to have no documented ill effects of eating venomous animals, like poisonous lizards in the desert and rattlesnakes. A lot of times what they do is double team a rattlesnake. One will distract the rattlesnake while the other one comes up behind it, hits it in the head, or grabs it by the neck and flops it around, knocks it against rocks and limbs and things like that to kill the snake, and then they'll swallow them. They've actually seen roadrunners with part of a snake's tail sticking out of their mouth for a while, and what it's doing is, they're so long, they're actually gladly, slowly digesting that snake, and then they'll finally get all of it down. But the snake killer is one of the things they're very famous for, and they are very good at it. Now, this bird's doing a unique behavior in this picture. It is sunbathing, and if you've been to the desert, if you guys live in the desert, you know this very well. While it can be 115 during the day, it gets cold at night in the desert. It is truly, you have to layer when I'm birdwatching out there. I have to have a jacket and zip off pants is what I usually wear, and boots, and in the morning, once the temperature starts to go up, then I can start peeling off layers to deal with the heat. Well, especially the roadrunners in the mornings, after a cold night, they sunbathe. They turn their back to the sun, and they raise their feathers on their back. They have black skin, and so the sun can get through and warm up their bodies, and in winter, they'll actually do this several times a day, this sunbathing activity. So, just another really cool adaptation for living in hot, dry places, and that's for sure. Once people learn about them, and their backyards, and how they eat other birds, and your bird feeders, and things like that, then all of a sudden, people don't like them as much as they once did, but usually, the way you see roadrunners is just like this, running across in front of you, and to find them, I know, I've been birdwatching tours in Texas, and New Mexico, and Arizona, and we've gone three or four days without finding a roadrunner, and they're thinking, what the heck, why aren't we seeing roadrunners? And then, one comes running across the road, right in front of us, and we get to follow it. One year, we were birdwatching in Arizona, and we were up on this little hill, and we saw this roadrunner coming at us, and so we just watched him, and just stayed real still, and he ran up the hill to within about 10 feet of us, and he ran past us, and at the top of the hill, then he turned around, he came right by, back by his skin, about within 10 feet, ran back down the hill, and right the way he came. So, you never know when you're going to see him, but it's great. In the spring, the males will attack your hubcaps on your car, because they see their reflection, so like a cardinal will do that, or a robin will do that to your windows here, and chasing off this reflection. Roadrunners do that to the hubcaps of cars. They see the shiny reflection, they see that roadrunner in there, and they peck at it, try to make it leave. They're great animals. They just have so many unique characteristics that they're worth learning about, for sure. So, I hope you enjoyed the video, and learned something new that might help you. So, if you did, please consider hitting that subscribe button, and don't forget to click the bell. That gets you notifications of when I'll be on next, and if you haven't, check that video description below the video. There's lots of contact information, and links to a lot more learning opportunities. Until next time, let's talk birds!