Project Bedrock

They’re back….!! 💕

For this especially big Independence Day week, we’re celebrating by appreciating the Black Bear (Ursus americanus) spotted at Shield Ranch Camp Wood... from a safe distance.

🐾 As you can see, this is a stocky, formidable animal, one of the largest mammals in North America. Adult Black Bears reach a length of 5 to 6 feet, height at the shoulder of 2 to 3 feet, and weigh 90-400 pounds or more, depending on food resources. Although generally harmless, they can injure humans when provoked and should be treated with caution.

🍂 Although classified as a carnivore, the Black Bear is a true omnivore, opportunistically feeding on a wide range of food items. Analysis of s**t (bear droppings) shows that vegetable material almost always comprises well over half of a bear's diet, with insects and other animals comprising a small percentage. In particular, fresh leaves, fruits, berries, nuts, roots, and tubers are favorite foods seasonally, with insects and small mammals eaten when the opportunity arises.

The greater roadrunner kills rattlesnakes by circling them on foot, dodging the strikes, then rushing in and stabbing the snake in the head with its beak until it can grab the body and slam it against a rock until the bones break.

Texas Parks and Wildlife describes the full sequence. The bird circles the snake at speed, leaping into the air to stay clear of the fangs, then darts in and drives its pointed beak into the snake's skull.

Repeated blows stun it. Once the snake is dazed, the roadrunner seizes it and beats it against the ground or a rock until the spine and skull are crushed. When two roadrunners hunt together, one distracts the snake from the front while the other pins its head from behind. They do this to rattlesnakes. A bird that weighs about a pound, killing a venomous snake with its face, on foot, in the open desert.

The roadrunner is not a raptor. It is a cuckoo. Its scientific name, Geococcyx, means ground cuckoo, from the Greek for earth and cuckoo. Unlike every other cuckoo on the continent, which lives in trees, the roadrunner lives almost entirely on the ground. It can fly, technically, but only for short bursts and only when it has to. Its wings are short and rounded and built for gliding off a ledge, not sustained flight. It runs instead, up to about 20 miles per hour, which makes it one of the fastest running birds in North America but, despite what the cartoon suggests, nowhere near fast enough to outrun an actual coyote.

It eats everything it can fit in its beak. Insects, scorpions, lizards, mice, other birds, fruit, and snakes, venomous or otherwise. It disables scorpions by biting off the stinger first. It gets almost all of its water from the animals it eats and almost never needs to drink. Excess salt is excreted through specialized nasal glands, which means the bird can live in deep desert with no standing water at all.

The desert tries to kill it at night. Temperatures in the Mojave and Chihuahuan deserts can drop forty or fifty degrees after sundown. The roadrunner handles this by entering torpor. It drops its body temperature from about 104 degrees Fahrenheit to 93, cutting its energy expenditure by more than thirty percent. In the morning it climbs onto a fencepost or a rock, turns its back to the sun, drops its wings, and raises the feathers along its spine to expose a patch of dark skin between its shoulders. The dark skin absorbs solar radiation directly into the bird's body. It can sit like this for two or three hours, essentially solar-charging itself back to operating temperature before it starts hunting. The behavior was first described in a 1971 paper in Science by Ohmart and Lasiewski, who called it energy conservation by hypothermia and absorption of sunlight.

Its feet have two toes pointing forward and two pointing back, an arrangement called zygodactyl, which leaves a track shaped like an X. You cannot tell from the print which direction the bird was going. The Hopi and other Pueblo peoples considered the roadrunner a medicine bird that could ward off evil spirits, and the X-shaped tracks were regarded as sacred symbols because they concealed the bird's direction of travel. Stylized roadrunner tracks have been found carved into rock by the Mogollon cultures of the prehistoric Southwest. Roadrunner feathers were placed on Pueblo cradleboards for spiritual protection.

It was one of the last bird species to receive legal protection in Texas because ranchers believed it was killing quail. It was not.

Source: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department / Cornell Lab of Ornithology / Ohmart and Lasiewski (1971), Science / Birds of the World.

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