THE ROADRUNNER IN FACT AND FOLKLORE

One tribe of Indians. English-speaking men living over the paisano's range-Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, most of Mexico, and into Colorado, Oklahoma, and Kansas-have generated an interest in it that not even unjust persecution has diminished. Descriptions of the bird, with emphasis always on its long legs, a tail that serves as a brake, running ability, brilliantly colored head, comical antics and insectivorous appetite, are to be found in many books. But the best description I know is Eve Ganson's in her delightful and delightfully illustrated Desert Mavericks.

The Road-Runner runs in the road, His coat is speckled, à la mode. His wings are short, his tail is long, He jerks it as he runs along. His bill is sharp, his eyes are keen, He has a brain tucked in his bean. But in his gizzard-if you pleaseAre lizards, rats, and bumble bees; Also horned toads-on them he feedsAnd rattlesnakes! and centipedes! The roadrunner is the most interesting bird of the Southwest.

FACTS

"On Them He Feeds"-Now that the urban hunter is envious of every quail that makes the morning cheerful and the evening tranquil with his call, the roadrunner has been charged with eating quail eggs and killing and eating young quail. and is even being killed out in many places on the assumption that this charge is true. It is a pity that authentic evidence is not as easy for the public to digest as superstition and rumor.

During the summer of 1938 Roy Bedichek, who is a good ornithologist, was on a United States Wild Life Refuge in southern Texas in company with a man employed by the government to help "balance nature." This man carried a gun and had, he said, "orders from Washington" to kill roadrunners off the refuge. "Why?" Bedichek asked. "Oh, because they eat other birds." Bedichek proposed to examine the craws of two roadrunners killed. The contents, spread out on white paper, consisted of nothing but legs and wings of grasshoppers-nothing else at all.

chek asked. "Oh, because they eat other birds." Bedichek proposed to examine the craws of two roadrunners killed. The contents, spread out on white paper, consisted of nothing but legs and wings of grasshoppers-nothing else at all.

In the early spring of 1932 two paisanos killed in the country near San Antonio were brought to the Witte Museum, where Mrs. Ellen Schulz Quillin examined the crops. In the crop of one killed on a cool day were found twenty-one snails, one cutworm, one bee, one spider, three daddy-long-legs, two pods of a nettle, two crickets, seven small beetles, two June bugs. In the crop of the other, killed on a warm day, were found thirty-one cutworms, twelve snails, nine beetles, one cricket, and many moths.

In Arizona Wild Life, October, 1932, D. M. Gorsuch of the U. S. Biological Survey printed a very interesting report on the food habits of roadrunners as determined by field observation and the official examination of one hundred roadrunners taken in close proximity to quail at a time when the quail were nesting or were leading their broods afield. Grasshoppers constituted 62 per cent of the stomach contents of the hundred roadrunners examined. Other animals included centipedes, scorpions, and tarantulas. The reptilian contents were mostly lizards, but part of a rattlesnake was found. "No evidence of quail or their eggs was found," although two cactus wrens, an unidentified sparrow, and a nestling meadow lark were found.

"About two years ago," Mr. Gorsuch continues, "I saw a roadrunner following a family of twelve newly hatched Gambel quail and their parents, as they fed through the grass. This appeared to be a splendid opportunity for the roadrunner to secure one of the chicks, for although the adult quail knew of its presence, they gave it little attention. The roadrunner's interest centered upon those grasshoppers that the quail started up and that flew beyond their reach. This continued until the roadrunner darted immediately in front of the cock quail to get a grasshopper, whereupon the cock turned and savagely attacked the roadrunner, who escaped by jumping into a mesquite, from which it sailed into an adjoining wash. On many other occasions a like proceeding has been observed, and it is my conviction that the roadrunner follows such feeding quail for the grasshoppers thus started up."

Just so, roadrunners-like robins and blackbirdssometimes follow a plow to get the worms exposed. The procedure is common in wild life. I have seen cowbirds hanging around the heads of grazing cattle to catch the insects routed out by the grazers. Gulls, terns, and other shore birds follow boats to catch the mullet dispersed. Coyotes squat around badgers to catch the rats that the badgers chase out of nests they are digging into. During the drouth of 1935 in Southwest Texas, while ranchers around Brady were singeing off spines from prickly pear so that their stock could eat it, two men reported to a A friend of mine that roadrunners followed the pear-burner every day searching the singed pear for roasted worms and bugs.

In 1916 the University of California issued a pamphlet on Habits and Food of the Roadrunner in California, by Harold C. Bryant. Insects comprised 74.93 per cent of the contents of the stomachs of eighty-four roadrunners examined. No quail were found, but two small birds were found, also lizards, mice, and a tiny cottontail rabbit. The small amount of vegetable matter consumed by the roadrunners appeared to consist of sour berries.

It must be admitted, however, that a few roadrunners do at times destroy a few young quail. Yet there is no evidence to support the common belief that roadrunners in general are persistent and customary predators on young quail; and in all the evidence both oral and written I have examined I have not found one single authentic instance of a roadrunner's having destroyed quail eggs. It may be that occasionally a roadrunner does eat quail eggs. But there are numerous instances of the destruction of mice, large wood rats, and various kinds of snakes by the birdand snakes and rats are undoubtedly much more destructive of quail eggs and young quail than the roadrunners are themselves.

An old-time Mexican ranchero whom I met at Parral, in the state of Chihuahua, told me that country people in that region sometimes catch the paisano young, tame it, and utilize it to catch mice and rats.

Nature balances itself far better than man can ever balance it. The most roadrunners I have ever seen are in that part of Texas where the blue, or scaled, quail are admittedly more plentiful than anywhere else in the United States. I refer to the brush country of Southwest Texas centering around the counties of Duval, McMullen, La Salle, and Webb. By riding a day in some of the big pastures of this region in late summer of seasonable years a man might count a thousand blue quail, many bob whites, and easily a hundred paisanos. În the sand hills north and east of these counties, still in the brush country, bob whites used to abound by the thousands-are yet plentiful on some protected land-along with many, many paisanos.

You will not find the most colts and the most panthers in the same pasture, or the most lions and the most lambs. You will not find the most shotgun hunters and the most quail in the same pasture.

And what if the paisano is now and then directly And what if the paisano is now and then directly responsible for one less quail to shoot at? He is a poor sportsman whose only interest in wild life is something to kill. How much more interesting and delightful is a country where a variety of wild life abounds! If it were necessary to choose between ten quail and no paisanos, or nine quail and one paisano, not many people who have any response towards nature or capacity for being delighted by the countryside would hesitate to choose the latter.

The value of the roadrunner to the farmer as an insect destroyer need not be dwelt upon.

The value of the roadrunner to the farmer as an insect destroyer need not be dwelt upon. A few years ago a rancher named John Henderson who was trying to raise young turkeys on Honey Creek in Kerr County, Texas, began missing several from his bunch. Taking his shotgun, he one day followed a flock to the creek. He saw a huge bullfrog leap out of the water, snap a little turkey up, and dive back into the water. He waited, and before long the bullfrog reappeared. He shot him, dissected him, and found the freshly swallowed turkey inside the frog. One swallow does not make a summer. Bullfrogs in general cannot be considered as destroyers of young turkeys. There are many individual variations among roadrunners just as there are among horses, men, and other kinds of animals.

Once while watching at a dirt tank on a ranch in Webb County, I saw a paisano that came up to drink peck at a frog, which escaped. A Mexican told me that the day preceding he had seen a paisano catch a small frog, beat it to death on the ground, and swallow it. Yet paisanos are characteristic of a country generally devoid of frogs, and certainly they are not generally frog-catchers. At a well not ten miles away from the one just mentioned, I saw half a dozen paisanos running around and around on the rim of a circular water trough, trying to reach down for a drink. The water was too low. Out in the middle of the trough, which was about eight feet in diameter, floated a good-sized board attached to the valve-float; this board was half covered with frogs. Not a paisano had sense enough to jump to the board and drink from it, and no paisano had the least intention of catching a frog. I placed a dead mesquite limb in the trough so that one end of it went down into the water while the other rested on the rim. Not one had sense enough to walk down the limb to water. Two or three paisanos were at the same time running around on the tin roof of the cistern that fed the trough, trying to get at water. The saying in Southwest Texas, "as crazy as a paisano," seemed here well founded, although in some ways the bird certainly is not "crazy." Paisanos cannot swim at all and they frequently drown in cement troughs and cisterns.

I estimated there were probably a hundred paisanos within a radius of half a mile of the cement trough. On August 9 I discovered near it a nest up about ten feet in a mesquite tree. On my horse I could watch the old bird feeding her young. There were three nestlings, two about ready to leave, and a third less mature. The parent bird fed them exactly in rotation, exclusively on grasshoppers, as long as I watched, which was about an hour, the provider at the end of that time disappearing. She-or heneeded a rest. A youngster would open its mouth wide; the old one would poke grasshopper-laden bill down the orifice and hold it there until the morsel was swallowed. Then she would volplane down to the ground and scoot up into another mesquite or fly directly from the nest into another tree. The ground about was entirely shadowed by mesquites. She was catching most of her grasshoppers in the mesquites among the leaves. From a point of vantage she would cock her head this way and that until she located an insect, fly softly to a spot near it, and thence make a swift dart. Usually she caught, but sometimes the grasshopper escaped. From her position up in a tree she could see grasshoppers flying and lighting. If she located one lighting on the ground, the way she volplaned and nabbed it was a pretty sight. She never missed a grasshopper on the ground as she sometimes missed one among the leaves.

Within a few rods of this paisano nest I saw five or six dove nests on which the doves were peacefully brooding, and I saw a little mocking-bird just out of its nest. The doves and mocking-birds did not seem to regard the paisanos as enemies. I saw a paisano make a pass at a rusty lizard, on a tree trunk, and miss it; the paisano seemed to expect this. I have seen dozens of green lizards in the bills of paisanos but never a rusty lizard. There is a very tall tale about a roadrunner in California that kept a hill full of lizards growing tails for him to eat. This paisano discovered that a lizard would, unlike Little Bo Peep's sheep, leave its tail behind it if the tail was snapped up, and would then grow a new tail just as good to swallow as the original.

Feeding time?

An astounding revelation of the voracity of the bird is given by G. M. Sutton in an account of two pet roadrunners, "Titania and Oberon," in his book Birds in the Wilderness. He tells how they manage to swallow horned frogs. The paisano digests rapidly. He will begin swallowing a snake inches long and after he has got a certain portion of it down must wait for the digestive juices to act before he can swallow further. Thus he may have to go about for hours with a part of the snake dangling out of his mouth before he can get it all down. He is truly, to use the phrase out of an old folk rhyme, a "greedy gut."

When Doctor H. A. Pilsbury of Philadelphia came to Texas and Mexico a few years ago hunting snails, I told him he should throw in with the paisanos. He didn't understand what I meant. I explained how in Southwest Texas-and probably elsewhere-the paisano picks up a snail, breaks the shell on a rock, and then eats the meat;

Yes! Here's lunch!

how he will bring snail after snail, to the rock he has selected as a meat-block, or table, to break it, passing scores of other rocks on his way; how sometimes at one of these rocks, or maybe a hard bit of bare ground, more than a cupful of broken snail shells may be picked up. Doctor Pilsbury replied that, so far as he knew, there was but one other bird in the world that eats snails in this way. That is an English thrush, and the places where the thrushes collect the snails are called "thrush altars." Should the paisano have an altar, a chuck wagon, or a mesa?

Eggs and Habits-The average clutch of eggs seems to be from four to six, but two or three often compose the number, and there are records of up to twelve. As soon as the first egg is laid, incubation begins, and the succeeding eggs are laid irregularly. In consequence, the birds hatch off over such a long period of time that the first fledgling will sometimes be ready to leave the nest before the last egg is pipped. After the second or third bird is hatched, the adults-for the cock is said to do a share in settingspend little daylight time on the nest, the body heat of the young sufficing to keep the eggs warm. According to Mrs. Bruce Reid, the male bird takes care of the first young ones to come off the nest, while the female feeds the last nestlings. Mrs. Reid had a pet male three years old that adopted and took charge of feeding two baby-roadrunners she brought home; he favored in many ways the female of this pair of young ones.

The nest is loosely built in an old log fence, in a Spanish dagger, up in a mesquite, within a clump of brush, etc. Owing to the long neck and longer tail of the bird, one sitting on a nest appears to be cramped, but perhaps isn't.

Little seems to be known about the mating maneuvers of the paisano. Do they pair for life? My brother, Elrich Dobie, who ranches in Webb and LaSalle counties, told me that twice he had seen a male paisano mount a female, and in each instance with a worm in his mouth that he reached around and gave to the female. There are more variations in the calls made by the bird than many people realize, and during mating season the calls are rich. While not to be classed as migratory, roadrunners do, I believe, shift their grounds to an extent in the winter.

EDGAR KINCAID

In August of 1936 I counted between 75 and 100 in a day on the old Buckley ranch near Cotulla, Texas. I could not be sure of the count, for some of the birds were certainly met twice. The next December on a deer hunt on the same ranch I saw only one bird during the day. Mexicans said the paisanos were down in the thickest thickets, but I was not convinced. A man who has a stock-farm out a short distance from San Marcos says that a particular roadrunner stayed on his place, often appearing about the barn and corrals, for several years. It would disappear during the winter and reappear with early spring. Paisanos are found far from water and in waterless deserts. Some observers have thought water not essential to them. This may well be in places where they have adapted themselves to desert conditions, especially since they eat animal food containing a high per cent of fluid. In Sonora there are deer that almost never drink water, although the same deer in other parts of the world drink more or less regularly. Where water is available, however, roadrunners are thirsty drinkers in the hot summer. In Southwest Texas they are exceedingly methodical and regular in coming to water. One time while I was watching a gasoline engine pumping water for cattle during the dog days of August, a period when the wind habitually fails to blow enough to turn windmills, I noticed how a particular paisano came every day about a quarter of twelve o'clock to drink. He was as regular as the sun. The bird has a great deal of curiosity and is easily domesticated if taken young. One will hop into the open door of a house and stand there a long time, looking this way and that. Perhaps he has an idea that some shadeloving creature suited to his diet is in the house. He will come up to a camp to investigate in the same way. I never tire of watching one of these birds dart down a trail or road, suddenly throw on the brakes by hoisting his tail, stand for a minute dead still except for panting and cocking his head to one side and then to the other, and then suddenly streak out again. The way he raises and lowers the plumage on his lustrous-feathered head while he goes crut, crut, crut with his vocal organs is an endless fascination. He must surely be the most comical bird of America. He will go through more antics and cut up more didos in an hour than a parrot can be taught in a lifetime. How the idea that he cannot fly at all got started, I cannot imagine. Down a hill or a mountain he can vol-plane for long distances. Frequently one will fly up into a tree to get a wide view. Of course, however, he is essentially a ground bird. His speed, like nearly everything else connected with him, has been greatly exaggerated. Any good horse can outrun one on a considerable stretch. Walter Fry of the Sequoia National Park, California, is quoted as saying that a roadrunner he was chasing in an automobile attained the speed of 26 miles an hour. Bailey's Birds of New Mexico gives his top speed, tested by automobile, as fifteen miles an hour. Running down a path ahead of a buggy or a horseman, the roadrunner often seems to enjoy the exercise as much as a pup enjoys chasing a chicken or a calf. While speeding, he stretches out almost flat. Sometimes he falls in behind a traveler and follows down a trail. He enjoys a dust bath. He can stand terrific heat, but on hot days he likes to pause in the shade, even though it be nothing but the shadow of a three-inch mesquite fence post. Killers of Rattlesnakes-That paisanos, singly and in pairs, kill rattlesnakes is a fact established beyond all doubt, although folk-lore amassed around the subject has made ornithologists slow to admit the fact. One vice of erudition is that it tends to patronize popular knowledge, greatnatured men of science like Audubon and W. H. Hudson being exceptions to the general tendency. In the fall of 1928 near Robstown, Texas, some dogs overtook a roadrunner unable to get out of the way because of a rattlesnake in its mouth. They killed the bird before men could stop them. After a photograph was taken of the dead bird with the snake dangling out of its bill, the snake was extracted and measured. It was eighteen inches long and had four or five rattles. For many years I have hoped to come upon a paisanorattlesnake combat-just as I have hoped to come upon two buck deer with antlers locked in mortal combat. The witnessing of either phenomenon depends so much upon chance that only a few individuals among many who spend their lives out of doors happen upon the scene at the right time. I have questioned scores of hombres del campo-men of range and countryside-about paisanorattlesnake fights, and I have the testimony of several whose word cannot be doubted. In October, 1932, Bob Dowe, of Eagle Pass, a strongbodied and strong-minded man who had had a great deal of experience on ranches on both sides of the Rio Grande, told me that he once saw a paisano kill a rattlesnake about three and a half feet long. The fight was in a cow pen. The bird in its maneuvers raised a great amount of dust. With wings extended and dragging in the dust, it would run at the snake, aiming at its head. The snake struck blindly, several times hitting the paisano's wings, without effect, of course. Finally the bird pecked a hole in the snake's head and punctured the brain. It ate the brain but nothing else. The shrike, or butcher bird, is said to thus eat only the brains of small birds it kills, which may sometimes be seen hanging intact on thorns or the barbs of barbed wire fences-a manner of wasteful selection employed also by plainsmen who shot down giant buffaloes merely for the tongues and by those ancient gourmands who banqueted on nightingale tongues. I have heard of the paisano's killing little chickens and eating only the brain. I do not know this to be a fact, however. I know that on the ranch of my boyhood and youth in Live Oak County we had many chickens and many paisanos, which often came among the chickens, big and little; the chickens never seemed to pay the paisanos any more attention than they paid the blackbirds, doves and quail. Between the pens at the stables and the branding pens was about a hundred yards of old log fence that had been built as part of a little horse pasture before the advent of barbed wire. In this old fence there were paisano nests every year. Snakes-particularly chicken snakes, but also sometimes coachwhips and bull snakes-ate eggs and little chickens; coyotes were a constant menace; but we never thought of the paisanos as being destructive to the chickens. The snake's most vulnerable part, his head, reminds me of a saying made by Victoriano Huerta while he was president of the southern republic: "México es como un serpiente; toda la vida es en la cabeza." (Mexico is like a serpent; all the life is in its head-the capital city.) And this brings me to Don Alberto Guajardo, of Piedras Negras, one of the best nature observers I have ever met. "I have never seen a paisano kill a rattlesnake," he said, in February, 1935, "but not long ago a boy on my ranch told me he had seen this thing so often reported by others. I asked him many questions to trap him in falsehood. In the end I was convinced that he was telling the truth. The boy said he first heard the paisano and then, looking about, saw the combat very near. With outstretched wings the paisano was making passes at the snake, evidently with intention of infuriating him. After many violent lunges, the snake subsided. Then with a swift leap the bird lit on the neck of the snake, seeming to hold it in his claws, while he pecked at the head two or three times. The writhing body of the snake made the bird leap away. A drop of blood showed on the head of the snake, and now it tried to hide its head under its body. Again the paisano attacked. This time he killed the snake."

Mrs. Bruce Reid, of Port Arthur, who has raised several roadrunners as well as many other birds and who has supplied much information to the Biological Survey, tells of having witnessed two paisano-rattlesnake combats. In each instance, the snake's head was bruised and bloody. One rattler, about three feet long, sought refuge in some cactus, but the paisano, as hot after it as a hound after a wildcat, got to it. In its writhings, the rattler brushed an irregular line of dead cactus leaves about its body-a circumstance that might account for the tradition of a cactus corral.

Sometimes the paisano is described as giving a "war dance" about the rattler to confuse and infuriate him. Wild turkeys are said to make attacks, occasionally, on rattlesnakes in much the same manner.

In the spring of 1932 Ellen Schulz Quillin, botanist, something of a naturalist, and director of the excellent Witte Museum in San Antonio, was quoted in an article appearing in the San Antonio Express as saying that while the paisano is an avid destroyer of field pests, there was little foundation for the belief that it kills rattlesnakes. Within a few days she received a letter from Alfred Toeрperwein, rancher of Bulverde, Bexar County. Toepperwein wrote that he had shot many of the birds while riding in his pasture but that a single experience had put a stop to all shooting. His letter as quoted in the Express of March 17, 1932, reads: "One day I saw one of the birds, feathers turned forward like an angry deer turns its hair, jumping up and down, back and forth. I paid no attention, but pulled my .45 and fired, missing the bird barely by an inch. The bird, not a bit frightened, kept its feathers up and kept jumping towards the same place. Then the rattlesnake story I had heard several times came to my memory. I went to the place and found a rattlesnake almost dead. I have killed no more chaparral birds since then."

I might adduce further evidence, considered by me unimpeachable, from Nat Gunter, rancher at Balmorhea, Texas; John Wildenthal, deputy sheriff at Cotulla, Texas, and other men, but I will conclude the testimony by a quotation from Time magazine, March 7, 1938, which reproduced also a picture, not fabricated, showing a roadrunner about to leap at a rattler, more than twice as long as the bird, with head and forepart raised to strike. "Last week," the article runs, "a full-length documentary film on Mexican animals, produced by Brothers Stacy and Horace Woodard, made the roadrunner-rattlesnake story a little less tall but no less telling. The Adventures of Chinco shows ten-year-old Goatherd Chico taking his siesta, guarded by his roadrunner pet. A rattlesnake approaches. Without hesitation the bird attacks, head feathers fanned and wings tensely spread. Like a matador, it lures the snake into striking, easily swings out of reach. Like a matador, it waits and feints till the enemy tires, then kills with swift skill."The filmers of this scene spent a year in Mexico taking animal pictures. The relation of the boy Chico to the bird may easily have been arranged, but the fight between snake and bird admits of no faking. The story of how a sleeping shepherd awakes to find a rattlesnake threatening him and is saved by the timely intervention of the snake's inveterate enemy is common. Jack H. Lee in his book of verse, West of Powder River (New York, 1933), has a ballad relating the incident.

An old Mexican in northern Coahuila told me that one time he found four paisano eggs in a nest and put them under a hen and hatched them out. They grew up to be pets around his lone jacal (cabin) out in the chaparral. One time after dinner, he said, he went to take a siesta under a runty mesquite tree not far from the jacal. He was sleeping soundly when the noise made by the paisanos awoke him. Impatiently, he gave them a scare; then he discovered that they had three medium-sized rattlesnakes cornered. He was convinced the birds had saved his life.Leaving man out of the picture entirely, the truth is being proven, and there is no reason why ornithologists should henceforth use the words “seems,” “perhaps,” or “it is generally said” in modifying remarks about lethal combats between paisanos and rattlesnakes.

II. FOLK-LORE

The Corral of Thorns-If I were writing an article strictly scientific, I should at this point drop the rattlesnake; but any animal is interesting to man not only for the facts about him but for what human beings associated with the animal have taken to be the facts. “No man,” Mary Austin says, “has ever really entered into the heart of any country until he has adopted or made up myths about its familiar objects.” Hardly any established fact about the paisano is as familiar to the public as some form of the story about the bird's corralling a rattlesnake with cactus joints and then either killing it or making it kill itself. The bird is certainly more interesting for this commonly believed and more commonly told story. It has appeared various times in print, nowhere so divertingly told as by The Old Cattleman in Alfred Henry Lewis's Wolfville, which account I borrowed for On the Open Range. Other forms of the story appear in other books for children: to cite two recent ones, Indians of the Pueblos, by Therese O. Deming, and Thinking, Speaking and Writing (Book Two), by Jameson, Clark and Veit.Nor am I prepared to deny that paisanos ever corral rattlesnakes. Perhaps they could. The act would be no more of a strain on nature than the building of a web by a spider to entrap a fly. It is claimed that snakes hear through the ground and that a sleeping rattlesnake could not be corralled without his becoming aroused. I do not know. The roadrunner runs lightly. But I make no argument, no denial. The stories are interesting. They are part of the history of the most interesting bird of the Southwest. Some of the narratives are very circumstantial-as all good narratives must be.

In May, 1933, I was introduced to E. V. Anaya, a practicer in international law of Mexico City. He was reared on an hacienda in Sonora, where he was associated with Opata Indians. He is as swart as a desert Indian himself and as decisive as Mussolini. The Indians and Mexicans of Sonora call the paisano churella, he said.

“Have you ever seen one kill a rattlesnake?” he asked.

“No? Well, I have-once.”

“I was out gathering pitayas,” he went on. The pitaya, or pitalla, is a cactus fruit. “It was in the month of May-the month of pitayas. I was just a boy, about 1908. I was with an Opata Indian.

“Just as we got to the top of a mesa, the Indian very cautiously beckoned me to come nearer. Then when I was close to him, he whispered, 'See the churella.' “'Churella,' I replied. 'What of it?' The bird is so common in that country that little attention is usually paid to it.

“This one is killing a rattlesnake,' the Indian spoke softly. 'Let us watch.' “We crept up silently, until we were within twelve or fifteen yards of the churella. A rattlesnake lay coiled on the ground, out in a little open space, apparently asleep. The churella had already gathered a great many joints of the cholla cactus and had outlined a corral around the snake. The corral was maybe three feet in diameter. “The churella was working swiftly. Cholla was grow-ing all around us and the joints were lying everywhere on the ground. The bird would carry a joint in its long beak without getting pricked. He built the little corral up, lay-ing one joint on top of another, until it was maybe four inches high. Then he dropped a joint right on top of the sleeping snake. The snake moved, and when he did, the spines found the openings under his scales. The snake be-came frantic and went to slashing against the corral. That made it more frantic. Then the churella attacked it on the head and had little trouble in killing it. The spines made it practically defenseless.” If a roadrunner were going to use any kind of cactus to corral or torment a rattlesnake with, cholla joints would surely be best suited to the purpose. Each joint is so spined that if one single thorn takes hold of an object and the object moves the least bit, another and then several other thorns will dig in. Instead of throwing off the cholla joint, movement causes the one thorn in the flesh to act as a lever for giving more thorns entrance. In the bad cholla country of Sonora I have ridden a native horse, wary of the thorns, that, nevertheless, caught several in his pastern. Then the only thing to do was to dismount, get a stick, and with it jerk the cholla joint directly out. I have seen a cave in that same country with enough cholla joints heaped in it to fill a freight car. They had been placed there by rats. The Papago Indians used to dispose of their dead by laying the body on open ground and then heaping cholla over ita thorough protection against all beasts of prey.

Snakes, rattlesnakes included, eat rats. All kinds of rats in all all parts of the Southwest build about their nests a defense of thorns against snakes and other enemies. The rattlesnake may not, as folk theory once held, been sensi-tive to the tickling of a hair rope; but he can't go like a shadow through an armor of thorns.

Not long after Lawyer Anaya of Mexico City told me his story of the churella, the cholla, and the rattlesnake, I went to see General Roberto Morelos Zaragoza in the city of San Luis Potosi. An ardent hunter and outdoors man, he was issuing monthly a small magazine called Aire Libre (Open Air), made up of hunting and fishing chron-icles. The general's primary interest in wild life was that of a killer, but he was naturally alert, and had made observations on the habits of animals.

He called the paisano a faisán (pheasant)-the name the bird goes by around San Luis Potosi. "Yes," he said, "with my own eyes I have seen a faisán kill a very large rattlesnake. The faisán took a tuna (the Indian fig, or apple) from a cardón cactus, dropped it on the neck of the snake, and while the snake was maddened by the thorns pecked it to death on top of the head."

An old German mining engineer named Engelbert Brokhurst, widely traveled, learned, observant, and cranky, whom I met in Mazatlan, told me that Indians of the West Coast of Mexico regard the paisano as a sacred bird and will not kill it. They all say that the bird corrals sleeping rattlesnakes and then torments them to death with thorns.

The evidence, however, is by no means all from Indians and Mexicans. Black Range Tales (New York, 1936) is a book of reminiscences by an old-time prospector and miner named James A. McKenna, of New Mexico. "One spring in Lake Valley," he relates, "my partner and I watched a pair of roadrunners. Morning after morning we met them outside the tunnel where we worked. Not far from the mouth of the tunnel a rattlesnake used to climb on a rock to take a sleep in the early morning sun. [They were out-of-the-ordinary outdoors men not to kill it.] It soon became plain to us that the roadrunners had spotted the rattlesnake. One morning we saw them making a corral of cholla joints and thorns around the snake. How quietly they worked until the crude circle was nearly three inches high! Then both birds ran with a strange cry towards the cholla corral, waking up the rattlesnake, which struck instantly. Hundreds of fine sharp thorns were buried in the tender underside of the snake's throat. The more he twisted and turned, the deeper the spines of the cholla worked into his neck. After a half-hour of writhing, he lay still. The roadrunners hung around long enough to make sure he was dead; then they hacked him to pieces, which they carried off to feed their young. Prospectors always keep on the lookout for rattlesnakes if they take note of a pair of roadrunners in the vicinity of the camp."

Yet some critic has spoiled this story by claiming that a paisano does not have enough force in his beak to tearthe flesh from a rattlesnake carcass.

Something of a variation in the use of cactus comes in an account written by Hampton McNeill of the Texas Panhandle. Hunting quail one day, McNeill heard "some kind of unfamiliar chuckling" going on just over a small mound. He stepped up on top of the mound, and there a "chaparral and a rattlesnake were fighting for life and death. The snake was completely encircled by cactus leaves. Its head had been pierced so many times by the cactus thorns that a match-head could hardly have been placed anywhere on it without covering a thorn hole."

The narrator probably had no magnifying glass to look at the holes. Remember, however, that the prickly pear in the Panhandle grows low and scrawny; the leaves (known to botany as pads) are not strongly jointed.

"The chaparral would run up to a cactus bush, take a good hold on a leaf with its bill, shake the leaf loose, and then return to the scene of battle. Using this thorny leaf as a shield, the chaparral would rile the rattler into striking at him. After the snake had struck several times, the bird would lay the leaf down near the snake. "The chaparral repeated this action several times. In the course of time, the rattler seemed to become completely exhausted, for he would no longer offer resistance when the chaparral returned with more cactus leaves. Having brought up two or three leaves without arousing the snake to action, he then disappeared in the sage brush. The snake was not dead, but I put him out of his misery."

Philip Ashton Rollins, in his generally excellent treatise, The Cowboy, describes still another mode of attack whereby the bird uses thorns but does not bother with a pen. "The chaparral-cock," he says, "might stop its hunt for bugs, seize in its bill a group of cactus thorns, spread its wings wide and low, and, running more speedily than could any race horse, dodging as elusively as does heatlightning, drive those thorns squarely into the snake's open mouth, peck out both the beady eyes, and then resume the hunt for bugs." According to the gente, a paisano uponfinding a rattlesnake charming a rabbit, slips up and jabs a cactus joint into the waiting jaws of the would-be killer.

The more usual end, perhaps, of the story of the rattler corralled by cactus spines is that narrated by The Old Cattleman in Alfred Henry Lewis' Wolfville. "At last comes the finish, and matters get dealt down to the turn. The rattlesnake suddenly crooks his neck, he's so plumb locoed with rage an' fear, an' socks his fangs into himself.That's the fact; bites himse'f, an' never lets up till he's dead."

I am not sure of final findings but I have been informed by scientific men that rattlesnake venom injected into the blood system of the very creature carrying the venom will be as deadly as in the blood system of any other animal. Such an end is not impossible. According to the tales, then, there are three possible ways for the rattler to die after paisanos have corralled him. (1) He may bite himself to death; (2) he may have his brain punctured by the bird's beak just as it is sometimes punctured without benefit of the corral; (3) he may be brained by thorns themselves.

What would happen if a rattlesnake bit the paisano in a vital spot may be deducted from an account in a book first published in Cincinnati in 1847, by C. Donavan, Adventures in Mexico. During his captivity in the Mexican War, Donavan visited an extensive botanical garden near San Luis Potosi, and there became acquainted with buaco -the most celebrated herbal cure for snakebite in Mexico and the southern tip of Texas. The discovery of the medicinal qualities of buaco, Donavan learned from the natives, was attributed to a bird that "feeds upon snakes and reptiles." Indians in the far past noticed that after a combat the bird would "search for the herb and eat it." Thus they learned from the bird, which Donavan calls the guayaquil but which is patently the paisano, the "sure remedy" for snakebite.

From the paisano, too-perhaps-certain Indians of the Southwest took the idea of putting long fringes on their moccasins and leggings as a protection against snakebite, the fringes suggesting feathers to the snake. Indeed, the wands used to calm rattlesnakes in the Hopi snake dance are of feathers, though they are of the eagle, which preys on snakes.

Other Lore-The very track of the roadrunner has among some of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico given the bird significance and protection. This track shows two toes pointed forward and two backward, and Indians duplicate it on the ground all about the tent of one of their dead so as to mislead evil spirits seeking the course taken by the departed soul. Again, an Indian mother will tie the bright feathers of a roadrunner on the cradle-board so as to confuse evil spirits that would trouble her child's mind. Here the feathers signify the track, which not only points two ways but is four-directioned like the Cross.

In his "Report" on New Mexico, printed by the United States Government in 1848 and containing much on the fauna and flora of the region, Lieutenant J. W. Abert inserts a curious note concerning the bird's toes. Although they are, he quotes an informer as saying, "disposed in opposite pairs, as in other species of the cuckoo family, yet the outer hind toe, being reversible and of great flexibility, is in either position (whether pointed forward or backward) aptly applied in climbing or perching as well as on the ground. Thus he at times pitches along the ground in irregular hops; again, when the outer hind toe is thrown forward, he runs smoothly and with such rapid-ity as always to be able to elude a dog in the chaparral without taking wings." Did anybody ever see paisano tracks with three toes pointing forward?

Certain of the Plains Indians hung the whole skin of the roadrunner-to them the medicine bird-over a lodge door to keep out henchmen of the Bad God. Before setting out on an expedition, a warrior would attach one or more paisano feathers to his person. At least one tribe of California Indians used the feathers for adorning their head-dress-probably with symbolic intent also.

An Austrian mining engineer I met in Mexico City told me that during many years of mule-back travel through mountains all over Mexico he had heard mozos-those indispensable muleteer guides and servants-in different parts of the country say that the corre camino is a guide for mankind, that if a lost man will find one of the birds and follow it, it will lead him to a trail. The corre camino not only fancies trails but follows them for the tumble-bugs (beetles) and other insects that come to feed on the droppings of pack animals passing over the trail.

One time while I was crossing the Sierra Madre from the Pacific Ocean to the city of Oaxaca, I saw three Indian men at a stream. Their shirtless torsos revealed them as fine physical specimens, and after I had, with permission, taken a picture of them, I asked which of the three was the jefe (chief). The two end men pointed to the center man. I gave him a package of cigarettes and rode on, trot-ting to catch up with my companions and the pack mules. The jefe kept at my heels. He had held this position for perhaps half an hour when I noticed a roadrunner just ahead of me about to cross the trail from right to left. The Indian picked up two or three rocks and chunked at the bird with intense earnestness, missing him, however.

I was surprised, and asked the Indian why he wanted to kill a bird that brought good luck. He said something in reply that I could not understand. He could speak only a few incoherent Spanish words and talked in his own dia-lect. Arriving in Oaxaca, I had considerable conversation with a savant named Paul Van de Velde. He told me that the Indians of that region claimed the bird brought good luck if it crossed the road from left to right but bad luck if from right to left. I remembered then that the bird my Indian escort tried so earnestly to kill was crossing from right to left. He was trying to prevent bad luck from coming to me.

Yet in many places in Mexico the bird is regarded as benevolent without respect to the direction in which it may be traveling. "Look, patrón," I have had a mozo say to me in the morning, "look at that paisano over there. We'll have good traveling today." A paisano that stays about the house is often cherished by Mexicans as much as the swallow building its nest under the shed roof-the swallow that always betokens good fortune. Among Mexicans on the Texas border the paisano takes the place of the stork in bringing babies into the world.

The bird is a true cristiano. One time Mr. Boyles of the Witte Museum in San Antonio, while out hunting specimens, stopped at a shack occupied by some poor white people. The woman told him that nearly every day they saw one or more paisanos stop at noon and bow their heads to pray.

"Is that what the paisanos are doing when they make bows?" Mr. Boyles asked. "Yes," the woman replied, "the Mexicans all belive the paisano stops at noon to pray, no matter where he is." The American woman's expression as she gave this information showed she wanted mighty bad to believe the Mexicans.

As has already been said, the very virtues of the bird may at times prove his death. The Tarahumare Indians of the Sierra Madre, perhaps the most remarkable runners in the world, regard the flesh of the paisano as not only wholesome but conducive to speed and endurance.

The eating of a paisano roasted over the coals is sup-posed by some Mexicans to cure the itch. This is a local cure based on a legend that centuries and centuries ago a tramp came to an Indian village, the inhabitants of which welcomed and fed him. Before long an epidemic of severe itch broke out among them. The medicine men finally ex-amined the body of the tramp and found it covered with itch. He had brought the curse. They turned him into a paisano, killed, roasted and ate him-and were all cured.

The paisano cure for boils is known all over the Southwest and Mexico. The fifteen-year-old son of the owner of a big ranch in West Texas had been with the cow outfit for two months. Then he became so plagued with Job's worst affliction that he had to be carried to the ranch in a car. One of the gente went out and shot two paisanos. The boy ate them fried and got well of the boils almost at once. Boiling, though, is usually better than frying; but any way taken, paisano meat beats sarsaparilla all hollow as a blood purifier. Mexican women grow flowers no matter if their home is only a box car housing a railroad construction crew; perhaps it is fortunate for the paisano that these cherishers of flowers do not set out many shrubs and trees. If you want such to grow, "kill a paisano, cut out the entrails, and put them at the bottom of the hole, just under the roots."

In northern Mexico, I have several times heard of the wonderful fighting cock, high jumping and lightningquick with his spurs, produced by crossing a paisano with a game chicken. But I have never been able to come upon this bird-just as I have never been able to come upon the marvelous hybrid resulting from a cross between a ram and a sow. A young man named Ramón who traveled with me into the desert of the Bolsón de Mapimí claimed to have once owned a very, very superior fighting cock out of an egg laid by a game hen fertilized by a pet paisano. He kept the origin of this extraordinary gallo a secret, he said, and won many bets off him. I might have been more inclined to credit Ramón's account had he not asserted that a paisano when run down will turn over on its back, hiding its head in grass, and stick up its rusty legs so that they appear to be dry weed-stalks or twigs. Yet, after all, why shouldn't a paisano use its legs as camouflage? One scared off a nest has been known to try to toll the intruder away by simulating a broken leg, as some flying birds simulate broken wings.

An even more wonderful bird than the paisano game cock is the pájaro cú.2 Nobody claims to have ever seen the pájaro cú. In the beginning of things he was naked, and all the birds held a kind of convention at which the owl proposed that each bird chip in a feather or two and thus make up a decent covering for the poor naked one. The peafowl objected to the proposal, arguing that a suit of so many colors would make the bird impossibly vain. But King Eagle, overruling the objection, ordered the feathers donated, provided two birds would stand as sponsors for the pájaro cú and guarantee his decent conduct. The paisano and the owl volunteered as sponsors. The new plumage was brighter and more varied in colors than a double rainbow. It went to the pájaro cứ's head, and he offended many birds, especially the peafowl, by his vanity. King Eagle called another convention of the birds to consider the case, but the pájaro cú was not present. Then the sponsors, the paisano and the owl, were ordered to produce him. They could not find him. They have been looking for him ever since. The owl at night calls whú, whú, whú, the closest he can get to cú, củ, củ, and the paisano runs up and down the roads by day, looking this way and that way, and shooting out like the sounds of a matraca, his crú, crú, crú, the nearest he can get to cú, cú, cú. A good deal of the time, though, he seems to say crut, crut, crut, rolling and trilling and twirling their sound that you know Spanish is his native tongue.

Although not at all a pheasant, early Spaniards are said on good authority to have called the paisano faisán réal. And a "royal pheasant" indeed this bird that now runs the roads once considered himself, as Jovita González heard the story among the border people. He had proud ways, as he still has at times, walking in the evening time with crest erected, long tail switching from side to side, lifting one foot deliberately before the other, and often raising himself to a stately height. He would not speak to such humble birds as the sparrows. The dove was too modest for him to notice, and the wren too pert. But all the bright, lofty and noble birds he addressed with cousinly familiarity. It was "Good morning, Paisano Zenzontle, and how is your Lordship," as he noticed a mockingbird singing on a high twig, or "How are you Paisano?" ruffling his throat feathers to vie with the colors of the cardinal he thus addressed. Even the eagle was paisano to him. One day while this king of the bird world had his lords and nobles together discussing grave matters of state, the vain fellow who considered himself a "royal pheas-ant" stalked into their presence without announcement, cocked his head over with the same ceremony he would use in looking at an earthworm crawl out of the moist ground, and said, "How fares my countryman?" And, my paisanos all, how are you?"

The eagle was simply furious at such familiarity. He screamed, "Out of my presence, you low-born thing of the ground. Never again presume to be a faisán. Henceforth stay on the ground where you belong. Forget to try to fly. Feed on tarantulas, scorpions, and beetles. Go."

The poor bird tried to fly from the courtroom, but could not. His wings had lost their strength. He had to run out of the room like a chicken. He has belonged to the ground ever since. And the name paisano that both people and birds call him by now is a mockery of the presumption he so long ago paid for.

Yet people like the paisano. When one man in this bird's wide range meets another that he feels warm sympathy for, he may say, "We speak the same language." But, if there is great gusto in the correspondence of spirits, he will say, "Nosotros somos paisanos-we are fellow countrymen-we belong to the same soil." And we true paisanos of mankind include in our kinship the paisanos of birdkind.