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BIRDS OF NEW MEXICO 
General Habits. —In the land of cactus and mesquite the grotesque 
Road-runner, the paisano , as the Mexicans call him, is a familiar 
sight. When trying to outrun your horse, his crested head is slightly 
raised, but his long neck, body, and long tail are held as level as a ruler, 
his powerful legs swinging rapidly over the road. His top speed, tested 
with an automobile, has been given as fifteen miles. In stopping, he 
throws up his long tail for a brake, and when his interest or curiosity 
is aroused stands at attention with neck craned forward, tail over 
back and legs firmly planted—a quizzical figure. 
Professor Merrill says “it is a delight to watch the easy abandon with 
which [the Road-runners] trot along among the shadscales, lower the 
head in a flash and scoop a lizard down their capacious maw without 
the least slacking of their gaits” (MS). Sometimes the unique birds 
become very familiar. A pair was seen by Mr. Jensen at a ranch near 
Santa Fe, feeding with the chickens, and the ranchman told him that 
they came regularly for a “hand-out” and often went to roost in the 
poultry house (1923b, p. 457). They might be especially useful around 
houses, as one has been caught by Mr. Anthony red-handed from 
killing a wood rat (1896, pp. 257-258). 
One found at Clapham by Mr. Ernest Thompson Seton, he tells 
us, “came running around the ranch house, behaving much like a 
magpie, pumping its long tail, behaving, as Coues says ‘like half mag¬ 
pie, half chicken.' ” Later “another came and enlivened the place, 
alternately as alert as a robin, then as posed as an owl. It hopped ten 
feet up onto the roof, apparently without effort or reason.” A speci¬ 
men brought Mr. Seton in December had its stomach crammed with 
grasshoppers. As he comments, “he must have worked hard to 
find them, for the winter cold and hard, but snowless, is on us" (MS). 
Two Road-runners that we saw at Carlsbad on fence posts border¬ 
ing an irrigation ditch, snapped their bills and chased each other up 
into a cottonwood on the bank where there were caterpillar nests. 
To determine what they had been eating, one was shot and its gizzard 
was found to contain not only caterpillar skins but a number of large 
grasshoppers, a large black cricket, beetles, a centipede six inches 
long, and part of a garter snake a foot long. The rest of the snake 
was down in the crop and the barely swallowed end up near the bill, 
suggesting Mr. Finley's droll photograph of his tame Road-runners 
standing with long, unswallowed lizard tails dangling from their bills 
while they waited for the process of digestion to relieve them (1923. 
pp. 186-187). 
A pair that Mr. A. W. Anthony watched at Hachita “came regularly 
to one of the mines for water. . . . The visit was made at nearly 
the same hour each forenoon, and was eagerly looked forward to by a 
