Sutton, on Road-runner 
17 
<*110 was occasionally captured by the birds. One rather large 
one, a little under three feet long, was harassed and pecked at 
at for over fifteen minutes, before becoming so nearly dead that 
lie could be swallowed. The incidents following Ibis were amus- 
ing. Naturally both Road-runners could not begin swallowing 
the same snake, head foremost. There was a long period of 
lighting during which time both birds swallowed the snake part 
way. Finally, strange to say, they left the snake in apparent 
disgust, and went after grasshoppers. Later in the evening, 1 
cut the snake in two. One bird, with the tail-end, got his portion 
down pretty well, and went about for some time with a snake 
tail protruding from his mouth. The other one, after several 
attempts to swallow the snake, left it, and because I was too 
lazy to hunt further food, I cut it up, and fed part of it to a 
Sparrow Hawk, part to two Screech Owls, and the rest to the 
Road-runner. I never had the opportunity to test the truth of 
the tales concerning this bird in its attacks on the Rattlesnake. 
The only time we knowingly had a rattlesnake near the birds 
were unable to find him in the mass of wild gourd vines. Probably 
the snake went into some hole. 
Seemingly painful but apparently easy enough, was the swal- 
lowing of horned lizards. These are not difficult to capture, and 
though they are hard to kill, when once discovered, they never 
get away. Very small ones, the same as young grasshoppers, 
are merely nibbled at and swallowed alive; older ones are beaten 
until quite numb, and the tough adults are often hit upon a stone 
a long time before being swallowed. These lizards always flat- 
tened out, raised up on their legs, and swayed backward and 
forward in a threatening attitude when confronted by their 
enemy, but the Road-runners never paid any attention. Once 
a horned frog was swallowed in a manner unsatisfactory to the 
bird, and, with a violent toss of the bird’s head, thrown up. It 
was still quite alive; perhaps the bird had felt it moving. In a 
short time he was swallowed again, however, and this time he 
remained. Similarly, a crippled English Sparrow which was 
swallowed alive was tossed up, thoroughly killed and then swal- 
lowed again in a short time. Again, a young chick, dead pre- 
sumably from some disease, was fed to one of the birds which 
was still too young to run about much. Though the chick went 
down fairly easily, the Road-runner was somehow dissatisfied 
with it, tossed it up, and did not swallow it again. These 
incidents tend to show the following facts or probabilities: 
