It’s not as easy as placing a dish of birdseed out on some isolated highway, but you can see roadrunners in Colorado. Unlike their ditzy television namesake, roadrunners are not blue. They have drab, mottled brown and white feathers that blend easily with their southwestern habitat. Roadrunners are large, up to two feet in length from the tip of the tail to the end of the beak. They have piercing, bright yellow eyes, a distinctive head crest, a long, white-tipped tail, an oversized bill and long, scaly legs with claws. They look somewhat like feathery dinosaurs.
Roadrunners are well named. They can run at speeds exceeding 17 miles per hour. They often do run across roads, but don’t always make it to the other side. Seventeen miles per hour is fast, but 55-75 miles per hour is faster! There’s a bit of roadrunner road kill out there. Still, roadrunners prefer walking or running to flying. In fact, they cannot keep their large bodies airborne for more than a few seconds. These birds have an awkward, clownish gait. They hold their heads and tails flat and parallel to the ground when running at top speed. Like other members of the Cuckoo family, they have feet with two forward toes and two backward toes. That tends to give them a waddling look, even if it is a very fast waddle.
Roadrunners prefer open, flat or rolling terrain with a scattered cover of brush, pinion, or chaparral. There, these carnivorous birds hunt insects, scorpions, lizards, snakes, rodents and birds. Because of their lightening quickness, roadrunners can snatch hummingbirds from the air and prey upon rattlesnakes. Roadrunners will herd or antagonize a rattlesnake with spread wings, then grab it by the tail when it coils and repeatedly bash its head into the ground until it dies. Roadrunners typically pulverize all of their prey by clobbering their victims against rocks or other hard surfaces and then swallowing them whole. If the prey is too big to swallow the entire length at one time, these birds will wander with the snake or lizard or whatever dangling from their mouths, consuming another inch or two as the rest of the body digests.
Food items also play an important role in roadrunner courtship. When spring arrives, male roadrunners offer choice morsels to females as a bribe to breed. The male dances and leaps around the female with a tempting lizard or snake dangling from his bill. If the female accepts the food, the pair mates. The female constructs a shallow, saucer-like nest in a bush, cactus or small tree. Roadrunners lay from two to 12 white eggs over a period of three days. The first chicks to hatch often crowd out the late-arrivals. Usually only three or four young finally fledge.
Roadrunners are uniquely suited to dry environments. They reabsorb water from their feces before excretion. Excess salt is eliminated through nasal glands rather than the urinary tract like most birds. They can get along without drinking water if the food they eat has a high enough water content, but also drink water if it is available. During the hottest part of the day, they rest to conserve water and energy. Conversely, to warm up after a cold night, roadrunners will turn their backs to the sun, fluff their back feathers, and expose skin along their back, which is black to absorb more solar energy.