Dinosaur? They would eat you and then me for dessert.

 

Here’s a dinosaur coming into my yard out here on the Branch everyday around noon. If I had to guess, I’d say it was a velociraptor, the same critter featured in the “Jurassic Park” movies.

You might call it a “Roadrunner”. You’d be wrong, looking only at its feathers, disregarding its reptilian scaly feet and legs; its three-toed feet; its desire to get around more on its feet than on its wings, and its absolutely voracious appetite for both meat and vegetables.

If they grew to half the size of humans, they would eat you, and then me for dessert. If they grew to the size of a standard poodle, you’d have to pack a sidearm when taking out the trash after dark; probably something along the lines of a .454 Casull firearm cartridge.

People ask, “What happened to the dinosaurs?” Come out to my place, and I will show you one. Keep your eyes open if you come. There are more where that one came from, and maybe one right behind you, this creature which the Mexicans call, “paisano”, meaning little one.

Would you be comfortable, say, in the woods, alone, knowing that now, today, T-Rexes are only the size of chickens? Little ones. Really? Hand me a couple more of those bullets over there.

I first saw my roadrunner, if you prefer, late this past May when it ran across the road running up the hill leading away from my house. I have lived out here for better than thirty-five years. I knew these creatures lived out here, somewhere, they do all over Oklahoma, but it was the first one I had ever seen in my stretch of the woods.

I continued seeing it all summer two or three times a week, always running in the same direction, which gave me an idea where its nestlings were, and one time with a lizard in its mouth cinching the whole deal.

One of my ID books says they prefer dry country which, you may have noticed, we have plenty of here in Oklahoma, even here in the eastern part of the state. Both the male and the female of a pair build a low, platform type nest off the ground, but close to it, which makes sense when you think about their preferred mode of locomotion.

That nest will carry four to six eggs which hatch in eighteen to twenty days. Sometimes a mated pair of these angry birds will nest twice in one season.

They will eat anything that does not get out of their way, but prefer insects, snakes (to surprising size), small mammals, and even other birds. Angry birds? Hungry, at least.

They are members of the cuckoo family but make nothing like the sound produced by your grandfather’s old clock. I used to hear this sound continuously when I was a hunting guide on a large ranch out in the Texas panhandle along the headwaters of the wild, Wichita River Breaks. I was puzzled by the sound, a low, descending, spooky cooing, until I noticed, almost always, seeing a roadrunner immediately following the sound. Two plus two equals four, right?

They can run up to fifteen miles an hour. Can you? And, of course, they can fly. Can you? Do you still wonder why I’m glad they don’t get as big as pit bulls? We are surrounded by blessings we don’t appreciate.

When the Woolards owned this newspaper (The Sand Springs Times), back in the Jurassic, Nadine worked with Joe here in the office. Nadine was an avid birder. We had that thing in common, and on the days I delivered my handwritten copy, she and I would almost immediately fall into the sharing of our most recent birding adventures.

In that time, Nadine had been seeing, regularly, a pair of roadrunners in her backyard out in the Saddle Rock addition in Prattville. Not knowing what to feed a roadrunner, nothing being in the books about feeding descendant dinosaurs, on a whim she began putting out pinches of hamburger atop garden rocks she could view from her living room window. It worked.

In August, the critters (it’s still hard for me to call them a bird) moved their operations into my yard. I first saw them (one at a time) as I drove down my driveway as they ran, for no apparent reason, along and right up next to, the rock wall that forms the base of our cabin home. It took me several days to figure out why they were suddenly there every day at about the same time.

Those rocks collected heat from the sun which collected insects which collected lizards which collected roadrunners no commas on purpose. Every day, I say, “everyday”, those birds knew where to find meat, and lots of it, and came to get it about the same hour of the day. Just like they did Nadine’s hamburger.

One time, close to fifty years ago now, Vernon Ellis and I were driving home to Sand Springs down Highway 97 from a day of quail hunting up around Rock School. About where the TV towers are located now, a roadrunner ran out in front of us, and Vernon ran over it. Beep! Beep!

Feathers flew everywhere. “Oh, no,” I thought, “We’ve killed this beautiful creature that we cannot eat.”

Vernon stopped the truck. I got out and walked up to the bird where it was lying on its side in the ditch next to the road on the passenger side. One of its marvelously intelligent eyes was blinking, full of life, staring straight into my own; aliens, both of us, with a close encounter, shared.

I smoothed its feathers, hoping against hope as they say. It opened its mouth, hissed at me like a velociraptor, and pecked the hell out of me. I dropped it instantly, obviously now in more pain than the bird was. It hit the ground upright, shook its feathers (that which were left) and darted, tailless, right into the woods in the direction that it had been headed before being interrupted.

So, there you have it. Don’t argue with me about what is a dinosaur. I actually held one in my hands, got bit by it, and lived to tell about it.

Copyright © 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen