As many birders can attest, roadrunners can be hard to pin down, always moving, forever on some important mission, rarely seen in the same place twice, so good luck getting one to stop and talk. This encounter took place in a patch of desert that I visit often, an area perhaps a mile long and half that in width, replete with stately old Saguaros, lots of Jumping Cholla, and nesting Curve-billeds, woodpeckers, and starlings in addition to the family of Cactus Wrens whose home I had found.
I rarely see roadrunners there, maybe five times in forty years, and more importantly to friends from the East that I take there to bird, I had only seen a snake in the area once, a Gopher Snake at that, not any of Arizona’s several species of rattlesnake. So, seeing the roadrunners surprised me, and I decided I would try to follow them and see what they were up to, maybe something more interesting than continuing to document the insect prey the wren parents were bringing to their young for breakfast.
The roadrunners ran down a hill, one seemingly hurrying after (chasing?) the other, then stopped without crossing the road at the bottom, turned and came back toward me, setting off a Killdeer that I hadn’t noticed that looked to possibly have a nest in the gravel. Both the Killdeer and I anticipated the roadrunners would find the nest, and as it scurried away perfectly performing the broken wing ruse, I readied the camera. The roadrunners, though, ignored both the Killdeer and me, continued past me up the hill and out of sight around a patch of mesquite.
For the camera, roadrunner will always trump wren and Killdeer, and here were a pair, so I quickly worked around the vegetation and glanced to my right where I expected to see them still chasing one another or perhaps even mating. The next few seconds became just a blur of adrenaline. The roadrunners were nowhere in sight, but I heard the Cactus Wrens off to my left going crazy doing that strident buzzing thing they do when predators are around, then I realized one of the roadrunners was right in front of me in a brush pile of downed Palo Verde branches. How had I not noticed it?!
This was as close as I’d ever gotten to a roadrunner on the ground. Who ever catches up to a roadrunner trotting off through the desert, right? So, not believing my luck, and not realizing immediately what was going on in front of me, I just popped my question about the state bird jealousy thing right off the top of my head, but then realized the bird was ignoring me because it was busy. Very busy! It had cornered a California King Snake and was attempting to . . . make a meal of it? I had never been this lucky with the camera in my hand! Ever! Full stop!
Okay then, it took the roadrunner a lot longer to subdue the snake than it took me to calm down and breathe again. Down on my knee pads, camera rolling on continuous shooting mode, I watched in awe as the bird struck at the reptile, poking, jabbing, lifting it, dropping it, the snake writhing, coiling, uncurling. Pausing the shutter button whenever the camera’s buffer filled up, I finally noticed the roadrunner had its eye’s nictitating membrane drawn most of the time and the king snake was bleeding in places.
The entire battle took twenty minutes from first contact until the roadrunner was able to ingest the entire four foot length of the snake! Here are some crazy things about this encounter: in forty years, maybe 4,000 visits, I had only seen a snake here one other time; I had only seen a California King Snake one other time in my life; photos of roadrunners with snakes typically depict rattlesnakes, venomous to be sure, but visually nondescript, but king snakes are beautiful; I had stood within yards of the encounter for several hours in preceding days watching the Cactus Wren nest.
It is well documented, including by me, that Greater Roadrunners dispatch their prey by bashing it against a rock to disarticulate it, then swallow it whole. I have photographed them perform this gruesome act with large lizards, small birds, gophers and ground squirrels. Sure enough the snake’s denouement came when its captor began lifting it over its head, twirling the writhing reptile aloft like a pizza chef, then whipping it downward onto a rock at high velocity.
I will never know the answer to my question of the roadrunner, and I will never know whether this roadrunner was the male or female of the pair because the second one had disappeared, I never saw it again, and this one wasn’t sharing its hard earned catch. Oh, and I don’t know whether it was the snake or the roadrunner that initially set off the wrens, probably both, but I know they circled the periphery of the scene throughout the skirmish, photo bombing several of my good images.
I doubt I’ll ever see a roadrunner at this patch again, and I’m sure I’ll never again see a roadrunner catch a snake. As for the snake thing itself, either I’ll never see one there again or I’ll step on a Diamondback Rattlesnake the very next time I go.
