‘Meep meep’
For many of us our first introduction to a roadrunner was in a series of Looney Tunes cartoons. Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner are a pair of cartoon characters that first appeared in 1949. Created by Chuck Jones, the American animator, director, and painter, for Warner Brothers, their antics were meant to parody traditional “cat and mouse” cartoons such as MGM’s Tom and Jerry. In each episode, the cunning and constantly hungry Wile E. Coyote attempts to catch and eat the Road Runner but is never successful.
In the series, the Road Runner is depicted as a blue bird with long brown legs and a dark blue crest on top of its head. He, along with his nemesis, lives in the southwest American desert surrounded by cacti, boulders, and sand.
The location, (except for the snow scene in the episode Freeze Frame) is pretty much the only accurate portrayal shown by Looney Tunes, because the cartoon bird bears little resemblance to wild roadrunners, which are indeed real birds.
There are two species of roadrunner – the greater roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) and the lesser roadrunner (Geococcyx velox). They are members of the cuckoo family which consists of approximately 150 species of birds including cuckoos, koels, malkohas, and coucals. Roadrunners are part of a subfamily called Neomorphinae, which are collectively known as the New World ground cuckoos.
The greater roadrunner is the largest cuckoo found in the Americas, measuring about 55 cm in length, with a wingspan of 50 cm, and weighing anything between 220 and 540 g. It has a distinctive shape with a very long, straight tail, long legs, a smallish head with a scruffy crest on the crown, a long neck, and a heavy bill that curves downwards.
The upperparts are brown with black streaks and pink spots, while on the underparts the breast is buff with dark brown streaks, and the belly is white. The crest on the head is black with small, pales spots, and in breeding season there may be a patch of bare blue and orange skin behind the eye although this is often hidden by feathers. The long, stout beak is grey-brown or grey, and has a hooked tip. Like all cuckoos, its feet are zygodactyl, which means it has two toes facing forwards and two toes facing backward on each foot.
The lesser roadrunner is similar but smaller measuring about 50 cm in length, and has a less streaked throat and chest, is browner on the rump and wings, and yellow on the undersides. The bill is significantly shorter.
The two species’ habitats do not overlap. The greater roadrunner is found in the southwestern United States and parts of Mexico, while the lesser roadrunner’s range extends further south to the west of Mexico and Central America.
Like other cuckoos, roadrunners will occasionally lay their eggs in the nests of other birds including the raven and northern mockingbird.
Contrary to the cartoon bird, roadrunners do not make a sound like a car horn, but have a number of distinct songs and calls. The most frequent is a series of 3-8 slow, downward-slurring “coo-coo-coo-coooos” that males utter to attract or contact a mate or mark a territory, and which can be heard from up to 250 m away. He usually sings this early in the morning from a high perch and often receives a response from another male in a neighbouring territory.
Scott Crabtree/xeno-canto
Richard E. Webster/xeno-canto
Richard E. Webster/xeno-canto
Bobby Wilcox/xeno-canto
During courtship displays, the male faces the female and makes a low pitched call consisting of mechanical-sounding putts and whirrs. He also snaps his wings and prances before copulation.
Both male and female roadrunners give a single “coo” following copulation, while another call is a low-pitched growl that they both make when foraging together or communicating with their chicks.
Male and females also make sharp, shrill calls that resemble coyotes, as well as chatters and groaning. These are the most common vocalisations made while incubating eggs and when they are raising chicks.
At any time of year, but particularly during breeding season, roadrunners make another distinctive sound called bill clacking. They snap their mandibles together to produce a rapid drumming like the sound of castanets. Bill clacking is thought to help individuals find each other, attract mates, and scare away predators.
In some of the cartoons, the Road Runner makes a noise while sticking his tongue out at Wile E. Coyote, which resembles its actual call.
Roadrunners are able to fly but rarely do so, spending most of their time on the ground. The greater roadrunner can reach speeds of up to 30 km/h over long distances, placing its head and tail parallel to the ground, and using its tail as a rudder to help it change direction. Lesser roadrunners run at about 20 km/h.
The fastest speed measured by a roadrunner is 42 km/h, which is the fastest running speed recorded for a flying bird, but much less than the flightless ostrich’s running speed of 70 km/h.
Roadrunners have various predators including raccoons, skunks, domestic cats, birds of prey, and indeed coyotes.
However, unlike in the cartoon, in the real world a coyote would easily be able to outrun a roadrunner. They can reach speeds of 65 km/h which is much faster than the speed of a roadrunner, so would have no problem catching up with one.
In 1976, a study titled Running Speeds of Crippled Coyotes published in the journal Northwest Science, showed that coyotes who had lost the use of one leg from injuries sustained from being caught in a trap, were still able to run faster than a coyote.
Bruce C Thompson, of the department of fisheries and wildlife at Oregon State University, who wrote the two-page paper also found that one of the three-legged coyotes managed to run almost as fast as one with four functioning legs.
Do roadrunners eat rattlesnakes?
Roadrunners are opportunistic and aggressive hunters. Their diet consists mainly of insects, such as grasshoppers, crickets, caterpillars, and beetles, as well lizards, small mammals, scorpions, snails, and other species of birds and their eggs.
They are one of the few predators or tarantula hawk wasps and rattlesnakes. They often work in pairs with one of the birds jumping up and down and flapping its wings to distract the venomous snake. The other bird will then either hit the snake’s head against the ground or kill it by pecking at it through the back of its head.
If the snake is too large to be eaten in one go, the roadrunner will leave with the snake hanging out of its bill, swallowing more of it as it digests in its stomach.
One Response
Very nice description of a bird we are familiar with through the Looney Tunes cartoons series!