Road runner rebound in the U.S.

When most folks here on the East Coast think of a roadrunner, they recognize it only as a cartoon icon that constantly matches wits with the equally iconic Wile E. Coyote. Those images are brought to you courtesy of Warner Brothers’ Merrie Melodies cartoon franchise. In every episode of these animated adventures, the resourceful roadrunner invariably outwits the technology-challenged coyote while voicing his “meep meep” battle cry. But in the natural world of coyote versus road runner, things are a bit different.

For one thing, roadrunners in the wild have a somewhat varied vocabulary, none of which comes close to the “meep meep” more suited to an old school Volkswagen than a bird. In actuality, male greater roadrunners produce a kind of “cocoo-coo-coo-coooooo” call that’s more dove or owllike than car-like. These birds also have calls that resemble growling and even yipping similar to a coyote’s.

The greater roadrunner, aka Geococcyx californianus, belongs to the cuckoo family and is indigenous to the Southwestern United States and Mexico. It’s also the official state bird of New Mexico. Growing to about a foot tall (and adding on a rudder-like tail that makes it around 22 inches long) it’s the largest member of the cuckoo family in North America. Although no roadrunners reside in Pennsylvania, the commonwealth is home to both the blackbilled cuckoo and the yellow-billed cuckoo, both of which stretch to eleven inches long. While both of these birds are listed as “common” here in the east, I’ve only seen and heard the yellow-billed locally. And while there are currently no roadrunners racing through the fields and forests of Pennsylvania, the birds are headed in our direction, recently extending their range eastward into Louisiana and Missouri.

When I first journeyed to Texas on a deer hunting excursion back in 2010, I never glimpsed a single roadrunner, same thing the following year. But returning to the Lone Star this past November, I discovered that the roadrunner population had significantly spiked and these odd birds seemed to be everywhere, joining bob white quail and Rio Grande turkey as the population-boosting beneficiaries of accommodating Texas weather conditions these past few years.

It seemed like every time we’d drive down a Texas back road or hike along a trail en route to a deer stand, we’d spot a roadrunner racing away ahead of us. I also observed a number of these birds while on stand. Although some freezeframes in the Warner Brother cartoons describe the animated roadrunner as “flightless,” it’s real life brethren are quite capable of taking to the air, although, like the wild turkey, roadrunners prefer to run rather than fly.

I managed to snap a few photos of roadrunners while on stand, and watched as one flew up into a tree, perching about six feet off the ground, surveying its surroundings for a few minutes before flitting back to the ground in quest of its next morsel of food.

And in their own right, roadrunners are just as much predators as their coyote adversaries. When it comes to diet, roadrunners are opportunists, pretty much gulping down anything they can catch, most famously rattlesnakes. Additional items on your average roadrunner’s menu include other reptiles, small mammals, amphibians, insects, centipedes, scorpions, carrion, birds, bird eggs, chicks.

To that end, Keylan Braddy of Albany, Texas, who helped out with some of the guiding chores during our hunt with Steve Ford’s Big Game Management guiding services, expressed no love lost for the roadrunner. “They’re bad news for the quail here,” he told me. “They eat the quail eggs and the chicks whenever they can.” Despite the dent these birds may put in the quail population, roadrunners, like birds of prey, are protected here. Killing one is illegal and may carry a penalty of $500 or more. Coyotes, on the other hand, are regarded as varmints that should be shot on sight.

But are roadrunners really on the menu of both cartoon and real-life coyotes? The answer is yes. Coyotes are essentially carnivores but can also be opportunistically omnivorous. They’ll feast on fruit, insects, and even prickly pear cactus, but prefer small mammals like mice, rabbits and squirrels along with ground nesting birds like roadrunners, reptiles, amphibians, fish, along with deer, elk, and antelope fawns.

But in order to dine on a roadrunner, the coyote would need to catch it first, the difficulty of which is the recurrent theme of the Merrie Melodies cartoons. On foot, a roadrunner can reach a top speed approaching 20 mph. A coyote in pursuit of game can reach speeds nearing 45 mph. Do the math. In comparing the speed of the twolegged prey versus the much faster four-legged predator, you might not give the roadrunner much of a fighting chance. But if pressed, the roadrunner always has the option of taking to the air and escaping the terrestrial bound reach of the coyote.

While I didn’t glimpse a coyote on my latest Texas endeavor, I heard plenty of them, especially after sunset when a howling, yipping, yapping chorus of coyotes permeated the dimming Texas twilight. It’s a primordial canine concerto that can send chills up and down a person’s spine, and not exactly a “merry melody” to any roadrunner that might be listening.

Coyotes like this one have a very expansive diet and will chow down on any roadrunners they can catch.