tkingfisher:newbirder:I saw my first Greater Roadrunners in Texas! They are cool-looking birds, let
tkingfisher:newbirder:I saw my first Greater Roadrunners in Texas! They are cool-looking birds, let me tell you. See more of my adventures at oneworldtwofeet.comLET ME TELL YOU ABOUT ROADRUNNERS.Looney Tunes did a real hack job on roadrunner kind. Now we all expect a goofy “Beep beep!” thing who outwits coyotes and runs around like a nit wit. Roadrunners are badasses. They eat rattlesnakes like it’s no big deal. Their bill is for slamming through the skulls of reptiles. They also eat insects, by which I mean Tarantula Hawk Wasps, which eat–you guessed it–tarantulas. They are the only significant predator of this wasp. Nothing else is fast enough and fierce enough to take ‘em. Also, sometimes they just cut out the middleman and eat tarantulas directly. In various Southwestern mythologies, the roadrunner is the leader of the birds, and among the Pueblo tribes, he can protect against evil spirits. His footprints by themselves are so powerful they can ward off evil. I knew a zookeeper who works in a Sonoran desert exhibit. They’ve got an utterly vicious roadrunner. He lies in wait in the exhibit and when a keeper goes in, leaps over their head (they can leap like whoa) and slams that snake-killing beak down on the top of their skull. He thinks this is funny. He also likes to go for feet, with toe-breaking force. They’ve tried to breed him and he kills the female roadrunners by stabbing them in the back of the neck and then mauling them to death. (This was also where I learned that some zoos routinely scrape their problem children animals off on other zoos. “Oh, you want a male roadrunner for breeding? Sure, we’ll ship him. No, no. Our pleasure. No take-backs.”) Since it is not really possible to rehabilitate a violent roadrunner and they do not wish to inflict him on another zoo, they are grimly waiting for him to die of extreme old age before they get another one. It may be awhile. In conclusion, roadrunners are seriously metal, (and some of them are horrible) and if your primary image of them involves ACME devices, you are missing out. -- source link