A very singular and yet a very little known bird is the roadrunner
chaparral cock, or, as it is known in Mexico and the Spanish sections of
the United States, the paisano.
[Illustration]
It belongs to the cuckoo family, but has none of the bad habits by which
the European cuckoo is best known. It is a shy bird, but is not by any
means an unfamiliar object in the south-western portions of the United
States and in Mexico. Sometimes it wanders up into middle California,
but not often, seeming to prefer the more deserted, hotter, and sandier
parts of southern California, and from there stretching its habitat as
far east as middle Texas.
It is not by any means a brilliantly colored bird, although some of its
hues are very beautiful. The prevailing color of the roadrunner is olive
green, which is marked with brown and white. The top of the head is blue
black, and is furnished with an erectile crest. The eyes are surrounded
by a line of bare skin.
It is not a large bird, being seldom twenty-four inches long, with a
tail taking more than half of that length. The tail, indeed, is the most
striking feature of the bird, being not only so very long, but seemingly
endowed with the gift of perpetual motion, since it is never still, but
bobs up and down, and sidewise, too, into every possible angle, and
almost incessantly.
But while its tail is most striking, its legs are most remarkable, being
not only long and stout, but wonderfully muscular, how muscular nobody
would be able to imagine who had not put them to the test.
A traveller in Mexico tells of going out with his ranchero host to hunt
hares with a brace of very fine hounds. Going over a long stretch of
sandy plain, relieved only by pillars and clusters of cactus, the
Mexican called the attention of his guest to an alert, comical-looking
bird, some distance from them.
With the remark that the gentleman should see some rare coursing, the
Mexican slipped the leashes of the straining hounds, which sprang off as
if used to the sport, and darted after the bird. For a moment it seemed
to the stranger a very poor use to put the dogs to, but he was not long
in changing his mind.
Instead of taking wing, the bird tilted its long tail straight up into
the air in a saucily defiant way, and started off on a run in a direct
line ahead. It seemed an incredible thing that the slender dogs, with
their space devouring bounds, should not at once overtake the little
bird; but so it was. The legs of the paisano moved with marvellous
rapidity, and enabled it to keep the hounds at their distance for a very
long time, being finally overtaken only after one of the gamest races
ever witnessed by the visiting sportsman.
The roadrunner, however, serves a better purpose in life than being run
down by hounds. Cassin mentions a most singular circumstance among the
peculiarities of the bird. It seems to have a mortal hatred of
rattlesnakes, and no sooner sees one of those reptiles than it sets
about in what, to the snake, might well seem a most diabolical way of
compassing its death. Finding the snake asleep, it at once seeks out the
spiniest of the small cacti, the prickly pear, and, with infinite pains
and quietness, carries the leaves, which it breaks off, and puts them in
a circle around the slumbering snake. When it has made a sufficient wall
about the object of all this care, it rouses its victim with a sudden
peck of its sharp beak, and then quickly retires to let the snake work
out its own destruction, a thing it eventually does in a way that ought
to gratify the roadrunner, if it has any sense of humor. Any one
watching it would say it was expressing the liveliest emotion with its
constantly and grotesquely moving tail.
The first impulse and act of the assaulted snake is to coil for a dart;
its next to move away. It quickly realizes that it is hemmed in, in a
circle, and finally makes a rash attempt to glide over the obstruction.
The myriad of tiny needles prick it and drive it back. The angry snake,
with small wisdom, attempts to retaliate by fastening its fangs into the
offending cactus. The spines fill its mouth.
Angrier still, it again and again assaults the prickly wall, until,
quite beside itself with rage, it seems to lose its wits completely, and
writhing and twisting horribly, buries its envenomed fangs into its own
body, dying finally from its self-inflicted wounds. After the
catastrophe, the roadrunner indulges in a few gratified flirts of its
long tail and goes off, perchance to find its reward in being run down
by hounds set on by men.
JOHN R. CORYELL, in _Scientific American_.
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Man is hard to satisfy. Poverty is the only thing he can get enough of.
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