If you grew up watching Road Runner outsmart Wile E. Coyote, you’d be forgiven for not thinking that the leggy bird has a place in Kansas.The background of those antics are always dramatic desert vistas with buttes and canyons for the coyote to fall into.
But the roadrunner has a growing home in Kansas.
The Kansas Ornithological Society maintains a checklist of all the possible species birders can see in each of the state’s 105 counties. It’s built off of several databases and updated with accepted sightings of new birds.
This summer, Geary and Clay counties were added to the list — bringing the roadrunner’s footprint in Kansas to 56 counties.
Chuck Otte started the Kansas county checklist project in 2000, while working as a county extension agent for Kansas State University. He describes himself as a “a little bit of a compulsive record keeper.” Otte’s diligence means that he’s able to say when a species was spotted in or disappeared from a specific county down to the year.
“Roadrunners were a little bit slow taking off, but the past 15 years they’ve really exploded to the north,” Otte said.
The Greater Roadrunner’s traditional range spans the scrubby desert areas of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and northern Mexico. It adapted its diet to pull most of its water needs from prey like snakes, lizards, small rodents and other small birds. And its back contains a section of dark skin, free from feathers, that it exposes to sunbathe and make use of rare mid-winter heat.
The roadrunner, unlike many of its cousins in the cuckoo family, doesn’t rely on trees for nests or food. Instead the roadrunner uses its long legs to speed between 15 and 20 miles an hour after its prey in arid grasslands.
Cool winters used to keep those environments limited, but that is changing.
Otte said in 1990, roadrunners were documented in 28 counties, primarily southern Kansas. Now, they’ve been spotted as far north as Mitchell County, near the Nebraska border.
“It's climate change,” Otte said. “It may not always be drying climate, but this is a species that is very opportunistic. It'll eat almost anything — 90% of what it eats is animals: snakes, lizards, small rodents, whatever it can find. So it's very opportunistic to keep moving, keep moving where it can find food and space.”
Bob Gress said he probably saw his first Kansan roadrunner 30 or 40 years ago. Gress is a naturalist, birder, photographer and was the founding director of the Great Plains Nature Center in Wichita.
He’s now seen roadrunners in Cimarron National Grassland, in the Red Hills area around Medicine Lodge, in Quivira National Wildlife Refuge and in more suburban settings like Maize.
“Everytime I see one it surprises me just a little bit,” Gress said. “You don’t go out specifically looking for roadrunners very often because your chance of reward is so slim that after a while you learn that you’ll see more of them just going birding than you do going to look for a roadrunner [specifically].”
Even so, Gress agreed to serve as my guide recently in a search for roadrunners just 30 minutes from Wichita.
Gress consulted eBird before we headed out. It’s an online database run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology where people can record bird sightings and submit photos and audio recordings from their phone.
The sightings are added to a map that becomes a near real-time look at how the range of a species is shifting. It’s an important tool that researchers use to understand population changes and migration patterns and guide decisions around habitat management and conservation efforts.
Gress said that while the Greater Roadrunner is still most prevalent in the American Southwest, citizen scientists from all over Kansas are submitting their proof on eBird and to groups like the Kansas Ornithological Society that roadrunners are making inroads in the sunflower state.
“Right here on the west shore of Cheney Reservoir, you can see where they have been seen,” Gress said as he showed me me a cluster of reported sightings on eBird. ”This is probably one of the most active places in the state right now for roadrunners.”
As we entered Cheney State Park, Gress called out some newly mowed grassy areas as a good spot to check. Roadrunners can make a feast off of the grasshoppers and spiders that they stir up walking through short grass.
“They just spook things and then they shoot out to grab it,” Gress added. “It’s fun to watch them hunt because they use their tail as a point of balance and they swing it around behind them just to maneuver as they’re on the run. They’re pretty acrobatic, pretty agile birds.”
Gress and I drove around some of the park’s campgrounds, looking for a roughly raven-sized bird with the coloring of a female pheasant among a handful of trailers parked for the week.
Roadrunners have been known to become habituated to people. In the southwest it’s not unusual for the birds to be regulars at campgrounds which offer lizards and insects easy access to food.
Gress also was able to call out other features of the park land that would be inviting to a roadrunner: a green racerunner lizard we saw would have been prime prey and juniper trees around the park are a favorite spot for the roadrunner to wait out the hottest parts of the day.
And he said the presence in Kansas of other animals native to the roadrunner’s home, like the armadillo, are also a clue.
“This portion of Kansas, that's been my home for decades now, is actually looking more and more like parts of western Kansas than it was when I first moved here,” Gress said. “It is drier now. Bird species are kind of changing more ... it's not a static world out there.”
Roadrunner sightings aren’t just popping up in Kansas. Reports of the bird now come in from Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Colorado, Utah and Nevada.
The National Audubon Society puts the population of Greater Roadrunners around 1.4 million. For many species, the Audubon’s Survival by Degrees project warns of the devastating impact a rise in global temperatures could have on foot sources and inhabitable environments. For Greater Roadrunners a rise in temperatures by 3 degrees Celsius — something that could occur by 2080 — could lead to a 27% expansion of the species’ range.
“Birds are the litmus paper of the environment,” Otte said. “They are the early warning system…. If we pay attention to the species of birds, which are a very sensitive species, it can tell us a lot about what’s going on.”
In Otte’s mind, the roadrunners reported in northern parts of Kansas aren’t a fluke. He said it’s more likely they are early adapters — members of a young generation of birds that’s looking for new territory in a newly comfortable part of the state.
A Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks employee that Gress and I encountered at Cheney Park agreed that the couple of roadrunners spotted in the area seemed content where they were. He said people had seen them just about every day, in the early mornings, “just cruising around.”
In spite of this, Gress and I did not see a roadrunner during our birding trip. The afternoon outdoors instead provided ample opportunity to discuss the migrating Franklin gulls, fishing styles of ospreys and the vulnerability of Kansas’ prairie chickens.
Gress said he didn’t mind that the endeavor started with a search for the bird behind the gangly Warner Bros. cartoon.
“If we're going to survive [then] we need to develop a whole system where we value all those other things that depend on Earth if they're going to survive,” Gress said. “Because we can't exist in a vacuum without other types of life around us, and whatever we do to other things, we have the potential of doing to ourselves.”
