The Truth About Roadrunners and Coyotes, According to an Ecologist
A coyote was recently photographed with a roadrunner in its mouth. Don't expect this to happen very often.
It’s one of popular culture’s most prominent battles between predator and prey: the cunning canine Wile E. Coyote vs. the fleet-footed Road Runner. In the popular cartoon, which debuted in 1949, Wile E. employs anvils, lasers, pogo sticks, and other contraptions to catch his speedy prey. Inevitably, the accident-prone predator’s plot ends in an explosive fashion (often resulting in him being flattened or singed) and the Road Runner zooms away to safety.
But do coyotes and roadrunners really cross paths in nature, and are interactions between the species as contentious as this photo from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology makes it appear? The photographer, who observed a roadrunner strutting alongside a seemingly perplexed coyote in Arizona, noted that the bird seemed to be “taunting the coyote.” And last month, a birder in Southern California photographed a coyote with a dead roadrunner in its mouth. But just how did it get there?
Unlike their spindly cartoon caricature, greater roadrunners are relatively stocky birds that are the largest species in the cuckoo family (the birds emit a low-pitched coo instead of the cartoon character’s “beep, beep”). That extra heft makes them awkward fliers. However, they are graceful on the ground and capable of running at speeds of close to 20 miles per hour. These speedsters also look the part with a streak of electric blue and orange skin behind their eyes, a tufted crest of dark feathers, and long tail feathers that act like a rudder as they run.
Greater roadrunners reside across arid grasslands, deserts, and other habitats in the American Southwest and northern Mexico (in recent years, the birds have been expanding their range eastward into states like Kansas and Missouri). They share much of this range with coyotes.
While the cartoons portray roadrunners as prey, the birds are actually adept predators. They eat everything from horned lizards to scorpions and even hunt rattlesnakes by bashing the venomous reptiles against rocks. If the snake is too long to scarf down in one gulp, the bird will walk around with the rest of the snake hanging from its bill, flaunting its hunting prowess.
Coyotes are seemingly insatiable and use their strong eyesight and sense of smell to locate their next meal. However, coyotes are not strictly carnivores. Scott Henke, a wildlife ecologist at Texas A&M, Kingsville, notes that coyotes are opportunistic omnivores that feed on whatever is available, including plants. In Texas, coyotes often eat fruits and berries in the spring and mesquite pods during the summer. In autumn, they’ll snack on grasshoppers before pursuing slightly larger prey like rodents and rabbits in the winter.
In the cartoon, Wile E. Coyote resorts to Acme equipment to catch the Road Runner. He probably would have had better luck simply chasing his prey. Coyotes can reach speeds of nearly 43 miles an hour—more than twice as fast as a roadrunner.
However, Henke notes that while coyotes may win a straight-line sprint, roadrunners are agile and difficult to catch. The birds can dart back-and-forth and weave in-and-out of bushes to slow down even the fastest coyote.
The roadrunner’s last resort is taking to the air. The birds are capable of short bursts of flight and can perch in trees to avoid danger. “Coyotes cannot climb trees or strap springs on their feet to bounce up into the tree branches,” says Henke, who grew up spending Saturday mornings watching the antics of Wile E. Coyote.
This explains why, in the wild, coyotes seem wary to pursue these elusive birds. “Coyotes rarely have roadrunner on the menu,” Henke says. As part of his research on coyotes, Henke has dissected around 1,000 coyote stomachs and has rarely found traces of roadrunner. But sometimes a wily coyote will still try to make a meal of a roadrunner—like the coyote in the viral photo. Henke thinks in that scenario, it is possible that the coyote caught the roadrunner as it was distracted by its own prey or that the canine scavenged its dead body (coyotes are never ones to turn down a meal, including roadkill).
Still, Henke thinks most coyotes would prefer to go veg than actively chase a roadrunner around. “Plant parts don’t run away and are easy to find and catch,” he jokes. Sounds like Wile E. could have saved himself a lot of trouble by changing his diet.
