Salute Your Compatriot

SALUTE YOUR COMPATRIOT BY EARL JACKSON

SOME folks think the Road-runner is dumb. Well, that may or may not be true. But it was a more stupid stunt than just an ornery looking bird can pull that caused me to miss the finish of one of the rarest dramas of the desert Southwest that of a Road-runner fighting a large rattlesnake. It was in central Arizona, and I was walking down the road which leads through the rolling hills to the famous Montezuma Castle National Monument, when my eye was caught by a flurry of motion about fifty feet off the road. Here, on a little open spot at the side of an arroyo was a fine specimen of the Road-runner going through some antics which would have done credit to a man on a three day bender. I'll call him George, for it is something like the abbreviation of his Latin name Geococcyx californianus.

George was doing an erratic circling dance, suggestive slightly of the Mexican Hat Dance. But he was going a lot faster, and darted in frequently toward the "hat" at full speed. Not quite reaching it, he changed his mind with lightning speed, threw up his tail and spread his wing feathers fanwise for a brake, and ran out again to continue the circling around. The "hat" in this case was the largest Western Diamond Rattlesnake (Crotalus atrox) I have seen in my thirty years in Arizona. Later, when I had killed the snake, it measured five feet six inches long, and wasn't completely relaxed then. And I was the dope who didn't have imagination enough to stand quietly by and see what would happen in this encounter between two deadly enemies. I frightened the bird away and dispatched the reptile with man's unfailing weapons. Years later, I read that about as many living people have witnessed a Road-runner-rattlesnake fight as have driven a car twenty-five years without a dented fender.

The next close meeting I had with George or maybe it was Georgiana, for male and female look so much alike that most ornithologists can't tell them apart was under circumstances not calculated "If you are a student of nature or of bird lore; if you are a farmer or friend of the farmer; if you love the desert and wish to see it as to add to his dignity. My wife and I were living on this same national monument, which, like other national monuments, is a perpetual game preserve. George was spied loitering near our kitchen door with the tail and hind leg of a large mouse hanging out of his mouth, the other end somewhere inside his anatomy He was certainly violating most of the rules of etiquette and good taste, not only for picking up the slightly ripe mouse which my wife had thrown out from the flour bin -where it definitely had no business but for being such a pig as to Continued on Page Fifty)