How to befriend a roadrunner

Step one: Carry around raw ground beef

A 20-foot-high roadrunner sculpture—made by artist Olin Calk from old sneakers, cellphones and computer keyboards—overlooks Las Cruces, N.M. The roadrunner is New Mexico’s official state bird.

I remember every roadrunner sighting I had during the two years I lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico. This is partly because they’re elusive birds, so it’s a real treat when you spot one. It’s also because I find them utterly fascinating. 

Roadrunners’ feathers are speckled black, brown and white and they have rounded wings and long, broad tails. They move in this really enigmatic way. Whenever I saw one, it was usually slinking along the stone walls that line the perimeters of houses (to keep out snakes) or picking through the shrubby desert for critters with its long beak. Occasionally it would pause as if listening to the wind, its fan-like tail slowly moving up and down. Then it would take off in a flash.

Roadrunners rarely fly, but they can run up to 20 miles per hour in little spurts. I read on the Texas Parks & Wildlife website that their fitful flights usually consist of “a spectacular leap into the air followed by a crashing dive into dense brush for concealment”—textbook shifty cartoon character behavior, if you ask me. Speaking of shifty, roadrunners’ tracks are X-shaped, which makes it impossible to tell if they’re coming or going.

The first time I saw a real live roadrunner was in Cruces in December 2020. Sean and I were staying in an Airbnb overlooking a pecan grove. Our quirky host Kurt declared in his intro message that he had a resident roadrunner he’d named Bill. (During subsequent exchanges, I noticed that Kurt sometimes called him Roadrunner Bob.) In any case, I was sure I’d have Bill/Bob eating out of my hands within a week. 

Unfortunately, we didn’t spot Bill until we’d been there for almost three weeks. I was working at the dining room table one afternoon when he slunk into view behind a couple of squat, resident desert quail with teardrop-shaped feather plumes on their heads that I’d named Joan Cusack and Tina.

Bill returned a few more times in the month and a half we were there; I suspect he liked the prickly pear cactus in the yard. He never stayed very long, and he really disliked being followed or talked to. Occasionally, I’d spot him around the neighborhood, dashing through the arroyo or rooting around near shrubbery. I’d plot my running routes based on past Bill sightings; once or twice I carried a half-eaten prickly pear with me in the hopes of tempting him, like some sweaty pied piper. But he always eluded me.

I knew roadrunners are carnivorous, but I always figured they were innocuous omnivore types—feasting mainly on grasshoppers and tiny lizards. Turns out, in addition to insects, seeds and fruit, they’ll go after eggs, rodents, centipedes and even tarantulas and scorpions; but their absolute choicest meals are lizards and small rattlesnakes. A roadrunner’s purported method for killing the latter is positively gruesome. It makes quick leaps into the air to stay clear of the snake's fangs, then rushes in to stab the snake with its beak. It stuns the snake with repeated blows then pounds it repeatedly against the ground or a rock until all of its bones are pulverized into a horrible, delicious, crunchy pulp. 

My friend Cynthia lives in the unincorporated hills of Mesilla, which overlook the dried-up Rio Grande and the spiky Organ Mountains in the distance. She and her husband Dick get all kinds of amazing creatures up there, like coyotes, mule deer, javelinas and bobcats. One time a roadrunner visited their yard in winter, getting closer than it probably should have, which led them to believe it was hungry.

“Throw him some raw ground beef!” Dick said. (Lucky they had some lying around!)

The roadrunner ate greedily; I’m guessing the texture reminded it of a succulent, mangled snake corpse. Soon thereafter, it returned with what Cynthia and Dick surmised was the rest of its family. The visits went on for several weeks until the weather started to warm up. At one point, the roadrunner got so bold that it would tap impatiently on Cynthia’s office window with its beak, reminding her it was there waiting for its beef.

Lamentably, Cynthia couldn’t tell me whether the roadrunners seemed to prefer lean sirloin, ground round, fatty chuck or highbrow wagyu. Just in case, I’ll probably buy a whole buffet of raw beef options to tempt Bill on my next trip to southern New Mexico. Maybe I’ll let him see me dropping a handful “by mistake” so he feels good about thieving it.

I imagine this is all frowned upon, interfering with the high-desert ecosystem in the delusional name of anthropomorphism. But pulverized snakes are much harder to come by, and I really think Bill and I could be friends.