by CKR
The roadrunner continues to visit. She seems to be becoming more wary of the human in the house, not at all becoming accustomed to me. But she is eating the suet I put out. I was wondering if someone else (cat? fox? raccoon?) was enjoying it too. Last night I had my answer in the form of a big red cat, snuggled into the corner, waiting. The suet plate was clean.
The roadrunner is the epitome of a sloppy eater, throwing pieces of suet around.
Using its wings like a matador's cape, it snaps up a coiled rattlesnake by the tail, cracks it like a whip and repeatedly slams its head against the ground till dead. linkShe did something like this with the sardine. I happened to be watching, and it was quite impressive. I suspect it’s the same with the suet, although I’ve diced it into quarter-inch cubes.
She doesn’t come every day (or at least I don’t see her) and hasn’t been roosting on the light fixture. The weather was warmer, in the forties for a few days, but the last couple of days the low has been in the single digits. Her irregular schedule is what is recommended to avoid terrorists and other predators. She does, however, warm up in the sun, occasionally in the mornings and more frequently in the afternoons. I suspect she roosts in one of the nearby piñon trees.
I think that the reason she doesn’t roost on the light fixture is that it’s metal. I suspect that roadrunners don’t have the heat exchanger capability with their feet that waterbirds have, the rete mirabile of blood vessels just inside their bodies from their legs.
But her feet are fascinating. They have two toes front and two back, with serious claws. Her legs look very chicken-y except for the arrangement of those toes. Roadrunners seem to me to be closer to their dinosaur ancestors than other birds. Their wings are shaped somewhat like the pictures one sees of primitive birds, and their two-pronged tail helps in balancing. She uses it almost as expressively as that crest. Here’s a reconstruction of archaeopteryx that shows some similarities.
I’m calling the roadrunner her because I’m experimenting with assigned gender and how using a different pronoun makes a difference in the way I think. Roadrunner sexes look alike, so I really can’t tell. The colors on her eyepatch are not as bright as I’ve seen on other roadrunners, and she seems smaller. It could be that she’s a yearling, or it could be that the colors always get fainter in winter, or the size could indicate she’s a he. Male birds tend to be smaller than females, although male roadrunners share egg incubation duties with the females, and that tends toward more equality in size
Greater roadrunners (Geococcyx californianus)are members of the cuckoo family. The books say that their call is a coo, so I checked that out. I was wondering if the evening coos I hear are roadrunners or white-winged doves. I’ll let you check that out for yourself. Darned if I could tell the difference. The Macaulay Library of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a nice collection of bird sounds, but I can’t link directly to them, so I’ll recommend this link, and then search for roadrunner and white-winged dove. Video as well as audio.
Despite the scientific name, the roadrunner is the state bird of New Mexico.
I’m not pleased about the cat, and I’m not entirely pleased about the roadrunner’s eating habits. I do like my lizards, who are probably hibernating now. I’m wondering if she digs them up with her strong beak, or for that matter, what she is eating besides the suet I’m putting out. That’s the problem with wild things: they tend to eat each other. I’ve had a sharp-shinned (Cooper’s?) hawk, even saw a pair the other day, around the yard for at least the last year. They eat smaller birds. Come to think of it, I’ve seen only a few juncos this winter, although there are a reasonable number of house finches.
As far as I'm concerned, she can fill up on mice. I’ve seen their footprints on the snow, so they’re out and active.
I’ve entered one of my photos of her in a local competition. I haven’t posted that one yet. The one above is a repeat, but it’s good enough for a second look. Click on it to get all the detail.