A Pair of Roadrunners

My first encounter with a roadrunner in the wild was through a second floor office window on Bell Road in Phoenix.  It was over thirty years ago that the bird seemed to be proffering to its own reflection in the glass a dead lizard that was hanging from its beak. 

I've since seen plenty of other roadrunners in Arizona.  Often they continued to carry prey, like the individual at the Desert Botanical Garden that held the corpse of a round-tailed ground squirrel.  Not far from it, near the park's outside café, another roadrunner amused diners as it begged for popcorn and then flicked the puffy kernels in the air in order to gulp them down.

It was on the same grounds where I encountered my first roadrunner nest.  High in a tree's dense canopy, the cluster of sticks hid a single immature bird that I watched mature over several weeks.  

My sightings in my back yard are probably much less frequent because a high wall surrounds it.  Roadrunners do indeed fly, or rather at least glide short distances after running starts.  But trotting unimpeded close to the ground through wide expanses of arid terrain and along roads seems more to their liking.  It's my front yard, despite the adjacent busy street's cars, that they definitely prefer.  And just yesterday, it was along a similar street that crosses over a tree-filled arroyo in my neighborhood where I witnessed my first pair of roadrunners.  

After all of these years I was surprised to find two of the birds together.  Unlike Gambel's quails that flock noisily in large groups, roadrunners seem to be solitary creatures.  It's always a lone individual that I see cross my hiking trail in the chaparral around Prescott or meander through the dense groves of agaves and palo verde trees of a brand-new housing development in Phoenix.

I described the two birds as a pair because they seemed to be paying close attention to each other.  To the best of my hearing they were silent; I can't say I've ever heard one call or sing.  But they each took turns scampering across the road to investigate some rocks or brightly blooming lantana or something unbeknownst to me.  The last one to visit the other side of the street even climbed a tree, all the while keeping its steely gaze on the underbrush sheltering its companion.

Not far away was a site where I had a much less pleasant encounter with a roadrunner several years ago.  Along the pathway that crosses under traffic-filled Lincoln Drive and connects my Biltmore community with another, I discovered a dead roadrunner. 

It was a disturbing sight, the bird hanging oddly in a clump of twigs in a bushy tree.  No more than six feet off the ground, maybe it was a nest holding the mummifying remains of a juvenile roadrunner.  But the bundle was so close to a trail, I doubted it was the original choice of location.  Could some bird of prey have dropped it from high in the sky?  

The roadrunner remained there for the few months over winter and spring when I revisited the route on my frequent hikes into nearby Phoenix Mountains Park.  I suspect landscapers eventually tossed the bird in with sheared branches and raked leaves when they did their annual clean-up of the property. 

I hadn't thought of the roadrunner corpse in a long time: writing this story resurrected the memory.  I don't recall where I read that to appreciate nature nowadays is to expose oneself to constant grief.  It was in a sobering essay on the topic of climate change, not on nature's dichotomy between beauty and brutality.  The sentiment was a dire predicament that much of the natural world faces: starving polar bears, burning forests, melting glaciers, plastic islands, dying coral reefs - such a long, sad list. 

Yes, I want to look away from the scorched landscape in my local parks with their withering trees struggling to survive the hottest temperatures and driest seasons ever recorded.  But still life hangs on and, in hopeful cases, adapts until humankind answers Earth's distress call.  Meanwhile beauty abounds, something two roadrunners just reminded me.  

First of two roadrunners in my Phoenix neighborhood.

First of two roadrunners in my Phoenix neighborhood.

First of two roadrunners in my Phoenix neighborhood.

Second of two roadrunners in my Phoenix neighborhood.