Towheeblog

My friend, Rich Fineo, lives in Palm Desert, and some of his neighbors move freely in and out of Rich’s garden…like this guy:

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One of the great 20thCentury admirers of roadrunners was the artist and ornithologist George Miksch Sutton. Click here for photos of a nest he found over a century ago.

Sutton had two pet roadrunners as a youth and later wrote a fine essay on what it was like to live with roadrunners. The siblings would team up to chase prey in the garden.

There is a Sutton Research Center for bird science in Oklahoma, where Sutton was professor for many years. They have a good summary of roadrunner traits.

Here is the center’s bio of Sutton himself.
He was part of the US team that barely beat out the Canadian team in the mid-30s to find the first Harris’s Sparrow nest…in Canada, naturally. That left only Marbled Murrelet as a North American nesting species with no nest yet discovered.