Roadrunners are the quintessential arid-lands bird. Almost everybody recognizes its shape. Most people have seen the slapstick cartoon that is a modern mythological icon. Beep-beep!

A roadrunner has claimed ownership of some property south of Midland. The bird's great-great grandfather claimed the same territory in the early 1980's, but the family moved away when humans built more houses in the area. This descendant is especially intrepid.

My wife Deborah and I often sit outside, enjoying the plants, birds, butterflies, clouds, dragonflies, lizards and box turtles. A dozen sitting places are scattered among the two acres of plantings of native and adapted species. The roadrunner has joined us several times, sitting next to us on an empty chair. He jumps up, intently inspects us, then turns to survey his surroundings. Sometimes he polishes his beak on the arm of the chair, and often shakes himself, fluffing his feathers and preening.

When he gets down to continue his meanderings, he will boldly scamper within 6 inches of our feet. It may be that the roadrunner remembers an early encounter when I caught a big grasshopper and tossed it to him, whereupon he promptly seized it, whacking it over an old mesquite branch lying on the ground. It could be that the roadrunner is "habituated" to us.

Roadrunners really make a BRRRT sound, not a beep. The sound is quite expressive and is produced by the rapid clacking of its beak. The roadrunner (nicknamed Magoosh in honor of a Lipan Apache that once traveled across the Llano Estacado many times) loves to startle our felines and us by sneaking up, then loudly calling BRRRT!

And there is other "intraspecific" communication between Magoosh and us. We are firmly convinced, for example, that Magoosh summons us to come examine some of his finds. He will BRRRRT until we show up, and then walk around the creature or object, alternately cocking his tail and lowering it, raising his head feathers to a bristly crest and then flattening the feathers back down. One evening he fussed at a fox until we showed up, and then continued his exploring as the fox hunkered down to avoid being seen.

The BRRRRT is also often an expression of irritation. The cats rush the roadrunner, ignorant of its deadly beak. The roadrunner sometimes sees the rush as a game, staying just out of reach of the cats, as he leads them around for ten minutes or more. He will finally fly a short distance, ending the game. Other times he flies into a tree and BRRRTs over and over, obviously cussing out the cats.

Another time, Magoosh seemed to banish me when I unwittingly interrupted him. He had been BRRRRTing on a post overlooking a woodpile near a shed. I had come out to fetch a tool from the shed, whereupon the roadrunner landed on the tin roof right above my head with a resounding and startling CLUNK! Had he spied a mouse exploring the woodpile and become upset my presence sent it scurrying for shelter?

Roadrunners must get bored. Follow one at a distance that does not bother it, and watch. On a ten-minute walk at the arboretum, Magoosh amused himself with a number of found items. First he pulled a wad of packing string from where it had been tucked into a one-gallon plant pot. He pulled it this way and that, as if trying to unravel it or to find its end. Giving up, he moved on to a strand of baling wire stapled to a post. He yanked on it, but it did not come loose.

So on he went, to a stack of unusable wood. A windstorm had snapped a girdled mesquite twig onto the pile. The roadrunner picked the twig up and walked up and down the woodpile, as if trying to decide a better place for the twig. Finally he put it down at the end of the pile.

A few feet further along, the roadrunner found an old steel wool pad that a packrat had dropped after stealing it from a trash bin. The roadrunner held it, peered this way and that, then carried it several feet away, leaving it in the middle of the path.

Roadrunners eat snakes, lizards (including horny toads), insects and smaller birds. Some play with tomatoes and may actually eat them, but Magoosh plucks them from the vine and carries them around, twice leaving one in a shallow reflecting pool that also serves as a bird watering hole.

A snake can be a difficult meal for a roadrunner to handle. A 2-foot snake can take an hour or more to choke down. Magoosh's great-great grandfather took his snakes to near the top of the windmill, where he sat, dangling the tail of the snake from his mouth, occasionally gulping another inch or tow until it all disappeared.

On a late afternoon walk, Magoosh's human observers found him peering into a clump of grass. As we walked up, the roadrunner sidled five feet away, turning to watch. The cat who accompanied us batted the grass, revealing a 2-foot kingsnake. As the cat continued slapping at the snake, the roadrunner returned to join us in intently watching the cat play with the snake.

Finally the cat noticed Magoosh and leapt at him. Deborah caught the cat and I grabbed the snake, and tossed the snake to the roadrunner. Frustrated, the cat squirmed out of her arms and chased the roadrunner again, while the snake slithered off. Deborah caught the cat again; the roadrunner returned to where he had last seen the snake and searched for another ten minutes, but to no avail.

When a roadrunner catches a sparrow, it first kills the smaller bird with the vise-like grip of its beak. Then it throws the bird to the ground, over and over and over, until the bird is a shapeless wad of feathers. Then it gulps the sparrow whole.

Many birds mob a predator by hovering above it and fussing excitedly. Roadrunners are hassled by mockingbirds and hummingbirds. Both swoop over the roadrunner's head, fussing and fussing. The roadrunner ducks away from the mockers, but ignores the hummers, who will sometimes follow a roadrunner fifty feet or more, hovering over its head, as if attached by kite string.

As a roadrunner patrols its territory, different gaits and postures reveal its intentions. A roadrunner traveling from one area to another trots upright, its head facing forward and held high. When it hears an unknown sound, it bends forward with its neck, head and tail a few inches off the ground and legs bent so that it seems to be scooting along. When actively hunting, each time it cocks its tail or raises its crest, a person can witness its thinking process.

"Hmmm, I hear a noise," as it raises its crest. It listens, and hearing more, raises its tail up tautly.

"Aha, there it is," and the crest goes down while the tail lowers part way.

"Whoops -- where did it go?" The crest pops up again. The bird tilts its head, listens and observes.

"Yeah!" The roadrunner stands still, stiff-legged, body tilted forward as a lizard comes into view. The lizard does not recognize the motionless roadrunner as a threat, and comes almost underneath the bird, when "WHACK!" The roadrunner juggles the lizard and with a toss of its head, down it goes.

Roadrunners are so cool!

 Magoosh spent the winter with us. Each night during the season he jumped to the lowest branch of an Afghan pine and carefully made his way to a fork three feet from the tip of the branch. Nestled between two pinecones, he stuck his long tail straight up in the air.

Often Magoosh would go to bed a full hour before dark. His preferred branch overhangs a lath house. A deck, gas grill, and sitting area are also located in the lath house. Magoosh, however, was undeterred by frequent human evening activity. A person could stand directly under him, and talk to him but only receive a mere blink of an eye in response. Candle lanterns, citronella oil torches, party conversation, and raucous music did not disturb him.

When the fierce storms of March whipped the tree into a dancing frenzy, Magoosh rode each gust with aplomb. A thunderstorm with explosive lightning and small hail did not send him scurrying for cover. The next morning he sat on the lath house singing as the sun rose.

Everyone should watch and hear a Roadrunner sing. The song is pleasant, somewhat similar to the cooing of a dove. It has a deep resonance that can be heard for an amazing distance on a quiet morning -- maybe as much as a mile. A Roadrunner puts his all into the song, looking like a drunk with dry heaves, head bent over almost to the ground, or branch, or lath house roof. The entire body of a singing Roadrunner swells and falls with the heaves of each note.

Over the past few months, a pattern to Magoosh’s days was noticed. The first activity of the morning involved going to the roof of the work shed. There, he would turn his back to the sun, lifting his feathers until black skin could be seen on his back through the soft hair-like down. Local folks have seen Roadrunners lift their back feathers to sunbathe when temperatures are below zero!

After an hour of quiet watchfulness, Magoosh usually flies sixty to eighty feet to a trail leading to the southwest. Along this trail is a large brushpile which is carefully stacked to give plenty of protection to roosting birds. Two Spotted Towhees, two Canyon Towhees, 25 White Crowned Sparrows, a Lincoln’s Sparrow, and 30 English Sparrows spent every night of the winter inside the brushpile, as does a dapper White-Throated Packrat. Magoosh hunts late risers from the brushpile, hoping to start the morning with a substantial breakfast of surprised sparrow.

Most mornings, though, the sparrows are expecting him, so he trots on down to the row of Tallgrass that creates a windbreak to the west. Another 75 sparrows of at least two species spend the night in the tall bamboo-like grass, along with several Mockingbirds, Pyrrhuloxias and Curved-Bill Thrashers. Magoosh skulks along both sides of the 150-foot long row, sometimes standing motionless for long periods, and other times taking one step every few seconds, creeping along unnoticed by his prey.

During the midday hours, Magoosh is rarely seen. He probably hunts away from the Arboretum . A lady that lives a third of a mile away has reported that a Roadrunner visits her. Is it Magoosh? Or does he take a siesta?

Between three and four p.m., two gallons of grain and three gallons of black sunflowers seeds are placed in three feeding locations in the arboretum. 75 Whitewinged Doves, 40 Mourning Doves, 10 Bobwhite, 10 Scaled Quail, 50 House Finches, 20 Pyrrhuloxias, 6 Cardinals, and other assorted avian visitors feed in waves until the light is too dim for humans to reference color. Magoosh returns and visits the feeding areas.

His evening hunting technique is similar to that of predators that hunt herds. At this time he rushes the feeding area, focusing his efforts on a smaller bird that is sick, old, injured, or for some other reason slow to react, providing him with a belly-busting early supper. He first crushes the bird with his beak, then throws the body on the ground repeatedly before gulping it whole. This behavior must tenderize the meat for digestion.

Although most of his bird hunting ends in failure, Magoosh is an omnivore, and is, therefore, afforded a variety of alternatives. As he ambles along the trails of the arboretum, he stops every few feet and sticks his bill under a grass clump or turn over a hunk of cottonhull mulch or snap at something flying from the ground. Even in winter, a number of insects are active on warm days. Midland’s butterfly lady, Joann Merritt, reported seeing a Roadrunner catching and eating paper wasps as they came to standing water. (Spicy food? Like jalapenos to humans?) Several times local naturalists have noticed Loggerhead Shrikes using a hiker as a bird dog. Early settlers noticed Roadrunners doing the same, paralleling a horse and rider to catch insects, rodents, and birds thereby disturbed.

Magoosh visits people as they work or walk about the garden. It sometimes appears that he is merely curious, for he comes within a few feet to peer up at the humans. “Introduce me to the newcomer,” his actions seem to say. Other times he gives a BRRRRRRT, as if to startle prey hiding between himself and the humans into rashly revealing its presence.

On a warm sunny afternoon in late February, I left the door open to enjoy the pleasant fresh air as I worked on a computer project. Totally engrossed in manipulating images to create a display for work, I was startled by a BRRRRRRT outside. Magoosh stood within 10 feet of the doorway, dangling a Southern Prairie Lizard from his mouth. When he saw that he had my attention he began to move his tail in a broad circle. A curious roadrunner raises and lowers his tail as he investigates. As Magoosh rotated his tail a number of times he lowered and raised his crest and tilted his head. After a minute or two, he trotted off.

A few days later as I drove through the gate I saw Magoosh hop onto a railroad tie fence and run along the top all the way to its end next to the road. As I pulled to a stop, he began to rotate his tail again. Sure enough, he had another lizard. This time, Deborah was at home. I ran into the house and brought her back out. Magoosh had moved to the shade of some New England Asters with the lizard, but as soon as he saw us come back out, he moved into the sun and and once again began rotating his tail again. “See, he really is showing me that lizard!”

In the workshed, there are several chairs that offer a shady rest spot while taking a break from gardening. Magoosh often visits the shed at the same time as we do. He wanders in, inspects the people, then hops to the top of a halfwall partition to settle down. At such a time, he sits five feet from us, his back to us, relaxing until his chest meets his feet. Sometimes he would polishes his beak on the wood beneath him, in the same pattern as a person sharpening a knife on a whetstone.

In the shed is an unusual mirror that was found where some disgusting slob had dumped household belongings along a dirt road near the house. (We have recycled a number of things scavenged from the leavings of people that consider the whole world a dump. We also haul their crud to the City Solid Waste Facility.) This mirror is constructed of 15 smaller rectangular mirrors glued to a heavy backing. Stacks of wood, stacks of pots, stacks of coffee cans, and a couple of large buckets of dry wood for the chiminea are stored in the shed. The mirror had been leaned against a wall on the ground.

Magoosh was seen carrying a lizard into the shed, and when followed, he was observed wagging his tail in the big presentation circle. Upon closer examination, he could be seen peering into the mirror, tilting his head back and forth, and watching his reflection. He then placed the lizard in front of the mirror and ran off. We examined the lizard and found that it was really a stick. Around the lizard-stick were another dozen things that Magoosh had brought to his reflection – a number of other twigs, and clumps of cotton from the gin trash. It appeared he thought that his reflection was a potential mate and he was presenting nesting material to “her.”

Worried that his misdirected affections would circumvent Magoosh’s urge to participate in the springtime activities that captivates the entire natural world, we turned the mirror face down.

But what might have been a sad story now has a happy ending. Following a couple of weeks of mournful singing as if pining for a lost love, two roadrunners have been seen gathering sticks before disappearing into the dense branches of a pinyon. One is Magoosh, who performs somersaults in the air as he catches hummingbird moths nectaring on the anisicanthus. The other is smaller, skinny, and skittish. Her name is Lozen.

The grackles of doom bring terror to the neighborhood. Great-tailed grackles are avian Hell’s Angels with their long tails cocked with insolent attitude. A heavy metal Goth music swamps the mind as they wheel into view overhead. As minions of random death, their actions are incomprehensible. They jerk baby birds from nests and toss them to the ground to bake in the scouring gusts of summer’s heat.

Hatred is an easy emotion. Anger bubbles up at the sight of the helpless devastated and a country person wishes to grab the household shotgun and obliterate each grackle as it appears. The sound of a grackle is a slimy, sucky, and slurpy non-musical blackboard grating wreck-of-the-nerves noise. The hairs on a person’s back stand up and goose pimples pop up and an uncontrollable shiver shakes a listener.

What if the gut instinct is not followed? What if the grackle is not shot on sight? Is there an ecological role they perform?

“They are not native, they only moved here twenty years ago,” the local birdwatchers report. “The habitats they have established themselves within are not native either,” an ecologist answers. “The sewage water swamps, the ranch pond cattails, or the city run-off retention reservoirs full of reeds are not natural either. Nor are the forests of the city. If it were not for man, the grackles would not have come.”

The native habitat of Great-tailed Grackles is coastal swampland. Miles of swampy estuaries were once filled with alligators, grackles, mosquitoes, crabs, and red-winged blackbirds among other less common animals. Grackles had to compete with the blackbirds for nesting space in the cacophonous smelly maelstrom of life.

Much of the habitat has been destroyed over the last century because is so unwelcoming to human visitation and seems to be such a waste of real estate. Coastal swamps are filled in to build condos or deepened and cleared for marinas. Only recently has our society become aware those coastal estaurine habitats are where most near-shore marine fishes and shellfish are born and nurtured. By necessity grackles learned of new habitats, and began opportunistically adapting.

The drive for survival is an awesome force of life within some species. Remember the coyote – hated by every sheepherder and chicken farmer and shot at every chance for over a hundred years, and what has happened? Now coyotes have spread to almost every state in the continental U.S. and now live in the vacant lots of Los Angeles and a hundred other cities.

Grackles, Starlings, English Sparrows, Cowbirds, and Pigeons are other aggressive avian associates that swarm into spaces humans create for themselves. The natural world often creates a teeming landscape filled with millions to billions of a number of species. Think of the plains of Africa and its incredible diversity until recently, or think of the plains of the U.S. in the early 1800’s with millions of buffalo, billions of prairie dogs, and thousands of wolves, black-footed ferrets, and even bear. Now the natural world is filled with another teeming landscape – billions of humans with millions of birds serving as familiars in the new regime.

The word “familiar” is selected purposefully in the previous sentence. Witches and shamans sought to positively influence their agrarian or aboriginal society’s psychic wellbeing using sophisticated symbolic psychology. Their “familiars” accompanied them – think of Merlin and his owl, for example.

We modern humans create an environment that reflects our maturity as a culture. We are like teen-agers, wanting everything our own way, poorly disciplined in our urges, and not planning our next action with our society foremost in our mind.

We, as a society, are all witches, as they are usually portrayed and as most people believe, as creepy negative manipulators. Our familiars are grackles, starlings, English Sparrows, cowbirds, and pigeons. Ghettos, barrios, and slums are a true reflection of the maturity of our society.

To me, grackles represent the squalor of inner-city poverty, of trash blowing in the wind, of the endless strip-malls in endless cities that abut each other on both the East and West Coasts, the countless boring car chase scenes on TV and all the other negatives of urban life any person can elucidate without end when depressed and disgusted. Grackles represent lawlessness, not wildness.

This has all been a preface to a continuance of the story of Magoosh. I needed to provide some background.  This is another chapter of his story.

When we saw Magoosh, our spirits lifted. “HI, big guy!” we would exclaim, and we often went “BRRRT” at him so he knew we were trying to talk his language. He demonstrated a fearless friendliness to us. We were introduced and welcomed into a wonderful and unusual relationship with a wild creature. It has been an incredible experience.

In a recent Discover magazine, an author wrote of individual wild animals that visited researchers at various locations and developed personal relationships with individual humans. The creatures are not pets, but are emissaries from the wild. When an animal acts out of the norm the people watching and interacting with it are stimulated to think and redefine what that animal represents to them. The researchers reported epiphanies like those that we were blessed by. “It surprises me totally that some wild animals are capable of accepting a human as a neighbor,” Deborah said. “This is the first time that the natural world allowed me within, beyond being an observer.”

A part of what surprises people is their own receptivity. Modern-day humans aggressively blunder through the natural world. The critters and plants respond defensively and bite, scratch, claw, sting, and poison. As a result, the natural world is seen as an adversary, something to be controlled forcibly. A different way can be learned by watching, listening, and analyzing. Wild creatures strain to be as aware as possible, to know what each sound means, be it near or far, loud or soft. Wild creatures have a holistic perception of their surroundings.

Compared to wild creatures, modern-day humans are totally self-absorbed and self-centered. Our society is built upon that ideal of supreme individualism. We have created a Golden Age. Our technology is powerful beyond any illusory magick ever conceived, but our society does not teach us of the magic and wonder possible by becoming receptive to our surroundings.

Magoosh opened our eyes to possibilities. The natural world can reach inside we humans and bring us to a marveling stillness, full of heartfelt aching awe. At the beginning of this section, an astute reader would have immediately noticed its tense. One day the Grackles came and screeched in the tree tops, and soon smashed eggs and baby birds were tossed to the ground. We reacted with anger, and rocks were thrown and firecrackers popped to scare the grackles. One grackle must have been injured, for we found it dead, floating in the pond facedown. We had killed in an anthromorphosizing self-righteous selfishness. “ We were defending the other birds, ” we told ourselves.

The next morning we found Magoosh dead on the County Road a quarter mile away from the house and his and Lozen’s nest. On his daybreak hunt a driver purposefully ran him down. (He was too smart to be run over by accident.) The death of this wild creature affected us deeply. We cradled his limp form lost to death’s finality and carried him to a place of burial. We honored him using Native American sensibilities by burning a smudge stick on his grave.

Lozen had to take over all the duties of the nest, so we decided to help her. We set pit-fall traps and caught lizards, and placed dog food and a lab mouse in a big tank under her nest. Lozen rejected our offerings. She sneaks away the back way when we approach the nest, and if she sees us on the trail she immediately darts into the brush. Her shyness heightens our memory of Magoosh's friendliness, and makes his loss even more poignant.

Roadrunners symbolize something else to me, now. Roadrunners represent perception shifts. As a person matures, often something happens that totally reorganizes their perception of the world. People that once seemed unfeeling suddenly are perceived as disciplined, for example. Sometimes learning comes hard in a struggle, and the new results are resisted.

I think I must use a story to illustrate the process.

I stretched out in the shade of the nogalito, looking down the draw. My eyes were at the level of the dry gravel streambed, so that the straight run of the draw seemed to extend a great distance. Heat waves helped the illusion, for after a certain distance, the image of everything beyond melted.

I was not really looking at anything. I had been pouring water on my head, flapping my shirt to speed the drying of the sweat. I rubbed at the sting of sweat salt in my eyes. Heat is inescapable, not like cold. Clothes can warm any cold. Nothing stops heat.

Finally I began to cool. I idly stared downstream. A dark four legged animal materialized in the heatwaves. The image twisted and shimmied until I could not tell if the animal was still, or moving toward me. I tried to focus my eyes better.

After a minute or two I could discern between its movements, and those of the heatwaves. No cow or horse was supposed to be in this pasture. Was it a deer? A javelina? Why would it be out in the heat of the noon?

The heat on my skin and the contortions of the image gave startling birth to the illusion that I was inside of a fire, looking out.

The image waited, except for the quavering of heat. I waited. Everything seemed to wait. I glanced away, to the sky. The glare of the sun normally washes out the blue sky in midsummer.

My eyes returned to the image. It separated, became two shapes that danced in solemn rhythm, bowing and promenading. In my mind refrains in a minor key revealed an interior fear. I watched the images dance, turning this way and that, hopping into the air, and then returning to the earth as if sinking into jello. Was it two bears? Two mountain lions? Fear rippled through me.

The two figures became Chihuahuan ravens, suddenly snapping into focus as they launched themselves into the midday glare out of the mirage. The leading raven carried a bloody morsel in his beak. Squawking and furiously trying to steal the meat, the second raven herded the first swiftly out of sight.

By the force of his personality, Magoosh redefined wildness. Wildness is not the fear that causes non-domesticated creatures to run at the sight of a human. Wildness means living up to possibilities. Fears limit most creatures, as well as we humans. Magoosh transcended a roadrunner’s normal fear. Can we overcome our fears? Can I over come mine? I may be able to take another baby step forward someday, thanks to Magoosh. I hope I can honor his memory by doing so.