The Road-runner 
More probable, in fact well 
authenticated, are the stories 
that Road-runners destroy 
young birds, as well as mice and 
other minor mammals. These 
matters have been pretty well 
thrashed out; 1 and while it is 
established that some damage 
is done to bird life, it appears 
to be a quite incidental and in¬ 
constant trait. Of more con¬ 
sequence is the bird’s enormous 
consumption of grasshoppers 
and crickets; and these form 
more than one-third of its entire 
diet. Beetles, cut-worms, and 
caterpillars come next in order, 
and of the latter, hairy cater¬ 
pillars, “woolly bears,” which no 
other bird, save Cousin Cuckoo 
(Coccyzus americanus occidental - 
is), will touch. Beetles, crick¬ 
ets, scorpions, lizards, and small 
snakes are swallowed whole; 
and the bird boasts a digestion 
which our American Croesus, 
he of the bread-and-milk diet, 
would surely envy. The ten 
per cent of vegetable matter 
with which the bird varies its 
regimen is found to consist al¬ 
most entirely of “sour berries” (the fruit of Rhus integrifolia ), 
and these evidently serve as sauce for snake and centipede a la mode. 
Of the notes of this cuckoo, very little has been said in literature, and I 
am not able myself to do more than report progress. Its usual daytime 
call-note is most like the whine of a dog which has been several times 
refused admittance to the house, Ookh ook(h) ook ooooo, trailing off into 
despair. The despair of the bird is manifestly the mock heroic ot the 
pleading lover. This pathetic sound, ventriloquistic and unplaceable, is 
one of the surest marks of springtime, at least along the brush-clad hill- 
Taken in San Diego County 
Photo by D. R. Dickey 
NEST OF ROAD-RUNNER IN TUNAS 
AND CHILICOTHE 
sides of southern California. A louder and much rarer 
song 
is uttered 
1 See an exhaustive inquiry by Dr. H. C. Bryant, University of Cal. Pub. in Zool., Vol. 17, No. 5, pp. 21-58, 1916. 
1142 
