CUCKOOS AND ROAD-RUNNERS: ROAD-RUNNER 309 
on September 5 had its stomach distended with three enormous grass¬ 
hoppers. 
At Mesilla Park, Professor Merrill found them eating fall web worms 
and stink bugs. He writes: “This Cuckoo is found anywhere in 
the valley where there is a dense growth of trees. Its preference 
seems to be dense bosques of tornillo, small cottonwoods, and willows. 
In such places it is heard rather than seen, unless one sits close out of 
sight and waits for the bird to come into sight. A slight disturbance 
and it slips from view without a rustle of a leaf. It is not very plenti¬ 
ful.” Arriving the latter part of May it nests in June in small cotton¬ 
woods and willows, leaving for the south in September (MS). 
In the nesting season, Mr. Shelton tells us, “the familiar ‘kow-kow- 
kow’ is forsaken for another note, a low guttural note, ‘kuk-kulc-kuk,’ 
always uttered by a brooding bird.” One of the other notes of the 
breeding season, he says, “has a wonderful ventriloquistic power, and 
when heard at a distance of fifty yards, often seems to be half a mile 
or more away” (1911, p. 20). This note of the English bird is spoken 
of by Wordsworth as 
“That cry which made me look a thousand ways 
In bush, and tree, and sky.” 
The Cuckoo is so rarely caught sight of except as it passes swiftly 
and silently across an opening to hide away in the dense greenery, and 
its notes when heard so startle you with the revelation of its unsuspected 
presence, now here, now there, that it is no wonder the poet exclaimed — 
“0 Cuckoo, shall I call thee Bird, or but a wandering voice?” 
Additional Literature.—Beal, F. E. L., Biol. Surv., TJ. S. Dept. Agr., Bull. 
9,1898.— Jay, Antonin, Condor, XIII, 69-73,1911.— Miller, 0. T., Little Brothers 
of the Air, 190-200, 1892. 
ROAD-RUNNERS: Subfamily Neomorphinae 
ROAD-RUNNER: Geococcyx californianus (Lesson) 
Plate 32 
Description. — Length: 20-24 inches, wing 6.5-7, tail 11.5-1$; eyelids lashed; 
bill decurved, feathers of crest and neck bristly, whole plumage coarse and harsh; 
toil long, graduated; wings very short; feet large and strong. Adults: Upper parts 
conspicuously streaked with brown and white, crest and foreparts of back glossed with 
steel-blue changing on lower back to lustrous bronzy green; upper tail coverts and 
middle tail feathers bronzy olive, glossed with purplish, outer tail feathers blue-black 
and green, tipped with white thumb marks; throat and belly whitish, chest streaked 
with black; iris yellow to orange, bare orbital space light blue anteriorly passing into 
bluish white beneath and behind eye, the posterior portion deep orange or orange- 
red; bill horn color, legs and feet pale bluish. Young: Similar, the iridescence devel¬ 
oping with first feathers, but streaking less sharply defined. 
