Thoughts About Really Cold Air

Note: Kind of a rambling post today. What can I say, it’s a crazy time for me at work. But you’re gonna love the graphics.

The seasons are officially tuned lockstep to the solstices and equinoxes, but I don’t think deep down any of us really believes that’s when they start and finish. Here in Utah, by September 21 Fall has already been underway for at least a couple of weeks; the real end of summer is more like Labor Day, or maybe LOTOJA. And the 2 or 3 weeks before the summer solstice, with their almost endless daylight, are surely more Summer than Spring.

Every season is like that, but none more so than Winter. Does anyone really think Winter doesn’t start till December 21? No, by then Winter is full-on. Depending on the year, it usually seems to start within a week or two, one way or the other, of Thanksgiving. This year, I know exactly when it started: Saturday, December 5^th, at 11AM.

Oh, it had already snowed a couple of times, and the week leading up to it was frigid- in the teens the 3 mornings before. But the foothills were still mostly dry and brown, and I’d still been mtn biking almost daily in the pre-dawn darkness. Saturday morning, hearing a change was in the forecast, OCRick, Vicente and I met at my place, pedaled over to the zoo, and started riding out Shoreline. The trail was frozen hard, as it had been the previous 3 or 4 days, and we rolled over the rock-hard ruts left by previous bikers during the thaws of the previous weekend.

Tangent: I a previous post, I mused that when you really get down to it, there are truly only 2 mysteries in life: the Mystery of Existence, and the Mystery of Self. I feel now that I misspoke, and that there are in fact 3 great mysteries in life: Existence, Self, and Why The Hell OCRick’s Camebak Is So Freaking Huge.

I’ve been riding with the guy for over 13 years and still have yet to figure out what exactly is in his camelbak. My current theory is that it contains one or more of the following: a) a ton of extra clothing, b)a cheesesteak, c) chemistry textbooks, or d) (dismembered & mummified) first wife. Knowing OCRick, it could be any of them…

Our plan was to ride to City Creek, then up to the radio towers and back, but as we crested the final rise before the City Creek descent, this is what we saw- the wall of the front.

If you think of Salt Lake Valley as a big room, the “window” of the room opens to the West/Northwest. In that direction you can see out past the mountains, across the lake, into the West Desert, even into Nevada on a clear day. And it’s from that direction that the weather comes. While we’d wound our way through the draws of the foothills, a dark gray front had rolled in through the window and into the valley. We stopped, stared West, and small fast-moving flakes started blowing around us. We turned around and started pedaling home.

As we sped back to the East, we could see the front roll into the valley. In this shot, looking South from 6,000 feet, you can actually see the front moving in, pushing out the week-old inversion ahead of it.

There was more wind than snow on the ride back, but what snow did fall didn’t melt on the well-frozen ground, and we left clear tracks through the dusting. The lead edge of the front was a patchwork of clouds and flurries, and we rode through repeated “sunshowers” of snow. Down, down, through Dry Creek, behind the hospital and back to the zoo we rolled buffeted along by Old Man Winter.

At home I jumped in the hot tub to warm up, accompanied by Bird Whisperer, and as we sat in the open air the flakes grew in size and carpeted the adjacent deck and lawn. Winter had arrived.

Side Note: Ever wonder why sometimes snowflakes are huge? It’s because they’re (relatively) warm and wet. Warmer flakes have a film of liquid water on the edges, and when 2 wet flakes come into contact, they tend to stick together*. When it’s colder, the flake-edges are frozen, and they flakes tend not to clump.

*This is because of the surface tension of water, which I explained in this post and showed in this Extremely Helpful (Albeit Ridiculously Obvious) Educational Video.

OK, you probably knew that already. But think about this: you ever notice that storms in the Wasatch often start up with monster-sized flakes, but as the storm continues, even though the snowfall continues, the flake size gets back to “normal”? Since leading edge of a storm front is where cold and warm air meet, and so the air temps are slightly higher, I’m guessing that’s why the flakes are big at the beginning. Once the storm “settles in”, the cooler air doesn’t melt the flake edges to the same extent.

BTW, I covered snowflake formation in this post last year.

The rest of the weekend was frigid, and we’re locked in for a while; temps won’t break freezing again till Friday at the earliest. Usually during cold snaps in Utah, you always have an “escape valve” in the back of your mind: St. George. You know that you could, just could, call in sick and drive 4 hours South and everything would be nice and Spring-like again. Even if you only actually do so once or twice a year, the knowledge that you could somehow makes you feel less “trapped.”

But this week we really are locked in; the polar air mass has covered the entire state. It may snow today in St. George, and it’s unlikely to break 40F! Up on Little Creek Mountain it probably won’t break 30F. This is it; Winter’s here, there’s no escaping, and I’ll just have to “man up.”

Side Note: The pay-off of winter-weather is of course skiing, but this week’s storm has arrived so far with fairly minimal snowfall and terrible winds. So far, it’s just the yucky part of winter.

When you think about it, the strangest thing about the seasons is how darn late they all are. Think about it. The Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year, is only 2 weeks away, but it just got really, really cold. A month before the solstice, in late November, the weather was still, on the whole, rather nice. But a month after the solstice, it almost certainly won’t be “rather nice.” Nor will it be much warmer 2 months, or possibly even 3 months after the solstice, even though the days will be so much longer and the sun far higher in the sky.

The reason of course is the oceans. They take a long time to heat and a long time to cool. It’s easy to forget about the ocean so far from it, but they act like a giant thermo-regulator throughout the year. Places far from the sea experience greater seasonal extremes in temperature. Utah is rough enough, but some of the wildest swings are in Central Asia, in places like Mongolia, thousands of miles from an ocean.

But what makes a week like this so rough is that the weather changes so suddenly. It’s not like every day for say 2 or 3 months, it’s like a ½ a degree colder or anything. No, it’s like in the span of a few days, the temps drop 20, 30, even 40 degrees. What’s up with that?

My first winter in Colorado was, on the whole, quite mild. Compared to a New England winter it was positively balmy, with daily highs in the 40’s and 50’s. Then one week, there was a minor snowstorm, following which it didn’t warm up for a full week. For a week the temps never climbed above 10F. The weatherman told us that an “Arctic Air Mass” had arrived. And every year I was in Colorado, once or twice a year- sometimes as early as October- an “Arctic Air Mass” would arrive, super-cooling the state down for a good 4-7 days.

Here in Salt Lake we don’t experience ‘Arctic Air Masses’ of the same severity, but we still do get them. This week it won’t break 30F until Friday, and freezing until Saturday (if at all.) So what is an “Arctic Air Mass” anyway, and why does it act like this?

Tangent: To be fair, the winter weather- and weather overall- of the Colorado Front Range is, on the whole, better* than the weather of the Wasatch Front. Their winters are warmer, their summers cooler. But we don’t get- by and large- those whacky Arctic freezes whereby it will stay under 5F or so for a week. I’ll explain why in a moment.

*Except for those annoying, clockwork-like summer afternoon T-storms. Nope, we don’t get ‘em.

An arctic air mass is just one of several types of air masses (graphic right, not mine) that form over a particular part of the planet, and then create significant weather changes when they change location, often as a result of a shift in jet stream. These air masses are huge, often something like 1,000 miles across. There are maritime air masses and continental air masses, and polar and tropical air masses. What we call an Arctic Air Mass is a Continental-Polar air mass, designated “cP” in meteorology-speak.

Way, way up North, in Eastern Alaska and Northwest Canada is the birthplace of the cP air masses that affect us down in the lower 48. Over long, stable periods of high pressure, the troposphere- the part of the atmosphere below 30,000 feet (the part that we can breathe in) becomes very cold. The reasons for this may seem obvious, and some of them are, namely the low sun angle and super-short daylight hours. But there are other compounding factors at work. The low sun angle means greater tropospheric length, which is the distance a beam of solar radiation must travel between the tropopause (boundary with the stratosphere) and the surface. The longer the distance, the more of that radiation is scattered. (This is why sunsets/sunrises are orange- the tropospheric length is huge.)

There’s also much less tropospheric water vapor. Water vapor is actually the most important greenhouse gas in most of the world because of its quantity. (CO2 is a much more powerful greenhouse gas, but there’s way less of it.) But the cold polar regions evaporate little water into the air, the air retains less radiation, the air gets colder, the surface gets colder, and so on. And then there’s the high albedo of the arctic land-surface. Snow and ice are wonderful reflectors, and good amount of the radiation that does reach the surface is reflected back into space.

So the air is cold up in Canada. Tough luck for them. But what makes it tough luck for us is when these super-cooled cP air masses make their way South. The force that drives them South is the polar jet stream. Jet streams are powerful air currents up in the upper troposphere, just below the tropopause that move from West to East*. They’re caused by solar heating of the atmosphere and rotation of the planet**.

*Usually. Lesser, easterly jet streams can form in the tropics.

**Jet streams also occur in the atmosphere of Jupiter, where the planet’s internal heat is also a causative factor. For more on Jupiter, and its Way Cool Moons, see this post.

The thing about jet streams (diagram right, not mine), and the polar jet stream in particular is that they don’t just go West to East. It’s a Westerly air current, but follows a meandering path across the continent. This path is called a Rossby wave. Rossby waves are caused by shear in rotating fluids. In the case of the Earth’s atmosphere that fluid is the atmosphere, and the shear is caused by the Coriolis effect with latitude.

Tangent: Rossby is for Carl-Gustaf Rossby, a Swedish-American meteorologist who organized the training of military meteorologists in WWII. He’s probably the closest thing we have to a National Meteorological Hero, but of course you never heard of him because, well, we, uh… don’t have National Meteorological Heroes.

I think part of the reason is that meteorology- specifically weather-forecasting- has a bad rap among the public. We all love to go on about how inaccurate weather forecasts are, which is funny, because if you compare weather forecasts to, say economic forecasts, which arguably affect most of us much more, weather forecasts are far more accurate. Really, weather forecasts- like automobile tires, fuel injection, and LED headlamps- are one of those things that have consistently and quietly gotten better and better just within our lifetimes. In fact, the average 3-day forecast today is more accurate than the average 1-day forecast was in 1980.

All About The Coriolis Effect

The Coriolis effect is all about conservation of angular momentum. Let’s pretend you wanted to kill your Arch Enemy, who lived in Tempe, Arizona. And fortunately, you had a Wicked Powerful Rifle (WPR), capable of shooting a bullet 1,000 miles in a straight line. So you stood in the middle of Salt Lake Valley and fired your WPR exactly due South. Guess what? You’d miss him. As your perfectly-aimed bullet sped South, it would appear to veer right. And if he shot back at you with a similar WPR, his bullet would also veer right.

The reason is that Tempe is moving faster than Salt Lake City. Both spin around the same axis, but Salt Lake, sitting about 800 miles higher up on the globe, is spinning more slowly. When both bullets are sitting- unfired- in their respective WPRs, the Mesa bullet already has significantly higher angular momentum than the SLC bullet, and as it travels North, across more slowly-rotating earth surface, that angular momentum is expressed by its rotating faster around the Earth’s axis than the land over which it is traveling, which manifests itself as moving more rapidly to the East (the direction is which the Earth spins) and to the right.

Conversely, the SLC bullet as it travels South, with its lower angular momentum, falls behind the land over which is passes with respect to the Earth’s rotation, and veers to the West, which is its right.

Tangent: I picked this example because I thought guns would hold your attention, not because I have an arch-enemy. In fact, as I was thinking about this example, there’s really no one in the world I’d want to shoot, even if I could get away with it. Oh, sure I might crack off a shot at Osama bin Laden or Kim Jong Il if the circumstances presented themselves, but I mean someone I actually know. Really, there’s just no one I have strong enough negative personal feelings toward that I’d want to hurt them.

Now, having said that, there are people I Really Don’t Want To Run Into. You know what I’m talking about- maybe a past co-worker you didn’t care for, or an annoying former neighbor, or an ex-girlfriend/boyfriend where you maybe handled the break-up poorly, or your wife’s friend-of-a-friend who manages to work every conversation into a pitch for why you need to start seeing her psychic*- that kind of thing. And I think about this because it gives me an idea for an awesome smart-phone application: The Proximity-Annoyance Alarm. I got the idea from some iPhone commercial I saw where a couple of unbearably-hip yuppies are trying to meet up for sushi or facial wraps or some such and they’re sending each other directions, and monitoring each other’s locations on- what else- their iPhones. Who cares? I don’t need to see where my friends are- if I really care I’ll call ‘em up and ask them. But I would like to know where the people I Really Don’t Want To Run Into are, and more importantly, whether I’m in imminent danger of running into them. So the Proximity Annoyance Alarm would allow you to input the mobile #’s of those people and then an alarm would go off when one was nearby, and the app would give you directions to avoid them. Now that would be a useful iPhone app.

*You probably thought I made that one up. I didn’t. I swear, I have the weirdest friends-of-friends.

South of the equator, the effect is in the opposite direction, and North-South trajectories veer to the left. These forces work not just on make-pretend bullets, but on real-world air currents, and the North-right/South-left distinction is why cyclones always rotate counterclockwise in the Northern hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern*.

*It’s also the reason why cyclones rarely form near the equator; there’s little Coriolis effect.

Anyway, this effect causes shear that alters Rossby Waves, and so from time to time the Polar Jet Stream bobs way South, driving a thousand-mile wide cP air mass down into the heart of the Lower 48. But as it does so, the brunt of the mass is deflected by the Rocky Mountains, and this is why Denver’s cP air masses are so much more icy than ours. The cP air is frigid across the upper plains, but as it slowly makes its way East across the Mid-West and the Appalachians the mass is gradually warmed and broken up, and this is why I never even heard of “Arctic Air Masses” growing up in New England.

So that explains what an “Arctic Air Mass” is, why they really are worse in Denver than in Salt Lake, and why I never heard of them in New England.

Tangent: But what it doesn’t explain is why Central Nevada is so much freaking colder than the Wasatch Front in Winter. Surely, any Wasatch Front resident who’s looked at a wintertime weather map has noticed this: Central Nevada is an icebox. The lows in places like Elko and Ely are usually 10-15F lower than in Salt Lake. Why is that? The latitude is the same, the altitude more or less the same, and they’re far from the Polar Jet Stream path. Why is Nevada so damn cold?

The first real week of Winter always seems to come on a bit heavy; it’s dark and cold and Spring seems years away. But solstice is just around the corner, and then every day is just a little bit lighter, hinting at the Living Year to come.

A Map of the Mesa

I’ll get to the real post in a moment, but first, a little background. As long- (really long) time readers know, possibly my favorite place in the world is Little Creek Mountain, a flat-topped 5,500 – 5,800 foot mesa in extreme Southwestern Utah, about 2 miles North of the Arizona border. What brought me there was the wonderful maze-like network of mtn bike trails built by the legendary Harris brothers, but the botany, geology and archeology are all fascinating as well.

Several years ago, trail-builder and local Morgan Harris told me about some rock art sites in the area. One stuck in my mind. He described a location in the interior of the mesa where there was a petroglyph atop a flat pad of slickrock alongside a shallow wash. And the interesting thing about this glyph was that it appeared to depict a map. A map of the mesa.

As- again- long-time readers know, I am fascinated with maps and geography, and the idea of this ancient map completely captivated me. A few years ago, on a solo trip with an extra hour of daylight to spare, I tried to locate the glyph, following Morgan’s directions from memory, but with no luck. A couple of years later, on a trip with the guys* I talked them into killing another hour helping me search, but again we came up empty.

*I think it was OCRick, Clean Colin, Rainbow-Spirit Paul, and maybe Hunky Neighbor, but not sure.

Perhaps I had the directions wrong, or maybe we walked right past it; petroglyphs can be like 3D pictures- invisible till you see them, then blazingly obvious. And besides, was it really a map, or was Morgan seeing something more than there was? After all, most of the rock art I’ve seen seems to be people and animals and geometric patterns and such- I hadn’t heard of any maps. Anyway, finding it has languished on my desert to-do list for probably a couple of years now…

The Post

As I mentioned in Wednesday’s post, we spent Thanksgiving down in St. George, repeating our winning formula from last year: just the nuclear family, rent a nice condo with pool & a hot tub, pick up to go Thanksgiving dinner on the way out of town, and bring bikes. Seriously, it’s awesome. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.

Friday morning we packed up turkey sandwiches and headed on over to nearby Land Hill, to hike the Tempi’po’op trail. Land Hill is a bluff that overlooks the Santa Clara River, and the rim of the bluff is packed with petroglyphs. This was our second time there, and we know there’s still plenty of great rock art we haven’t found yet.

Side Note #1: The Tempi’po’op trail is also open to bikes. And it looks like it was be a pleasant little ride. But, my strong advice is not to bike it your first time, and the reason is that probably >95% of the rock art is off the trail, along the rim. If you want to find the art, you need to be about 20’ south of the trail, hopping from slab, to slab, looking down and paying attention. Now, on a subsequent trip, if you can remember the sites you want to visit, then by all means ride your mtn bike. But walk it the first time.

Side Note #2: There’s some interesting botany on this trail as well, including several Ironwoods and a couple of tree-sized Cliffroses that are really impressive. And the lichens are fantabulous.

We had a wonderful time. The whole family got into it, each of us making our own finds and discoveries. There were human figures and masks and Bighorn sheep and giant bear-paw-prints and snakes and fascinating geometric patterns- grids, checkerboards, intersecting patterns of lines and all sorts of things. Really, I can’t recommend this trail highly enough, especially as an easy family-friendly outing.

I’ve seen a fair amount of rock art, and already knew a bit of the pre-European history of the Virgin River valley, but that evening, back at the condo, I spent a couple of hours researching rock art in the area.

Humans have been living in or passing through the valley for something like 10,000 years, and this is reflected in the rock art in places like Land Hill; many glyphs are only 800 or 900 years old, but others date back maybe 5,000 years or more. Around 450 AD* Indians started arriving and settling in the Virgin River in greater numbers through an apparent series of in-migrations, and engaged in farming and village-building in flattish sites by the Virgin and Santa Clara rivers that were suitable for irrigation. Over the next several centuries this area became part of a broader culture, extending from near Las Vegas to South-Central Utah, known to archeologists as the Western Anasazi.

*Found multiple dates for this one. May be more like 0 AD.

The Western Anasazi don’t get nearly the airplay of the Mesa Verde Anasazi, Kayenta Anasazi, or Chacoan cultures further to the east. In part that may be because their ruins lack the spectacular cliff dwellings of some of their Eastern neighbors, but for centuries the Western Anasazi thrived in Southwest Utah and Southern Nevada, and had clear, regular trade links with cultures to the East and South, as evidenced by art, architecture and pottery. The culture persisted until ~1150 AD, when the Pueblo Indians of the valley appear to have left the area for destinations further South.

Extra Detail: The whole topic of the migration, abandonment, decline, disappearance or whatever of the Colorado Plateau region by the Anasazi- of all types- is a huge, complex and controversial issue that I’m not going to get into in this post*. In the specific case of the Virgin River Anasazi, a common suspect for the last 20 years has been a 30-year drought around the mid-1100’s. Other researchers however, question this drought-hypothesis, and propose other possible explanations, such as climate change on plateaus higher up and to the East, which could have forced people down off those plateaus, and into places like the Virgin River valley, changing the population dynamics and leading to conflict or collapse.

*But I just read a fantastic book on the topic that I’ll mention in a reading-list post I hope to do soon.

An interesting thing about the final out-migration though is that it appears to have been preceded by an earlier out-migration, around 950AD, in which Virgin River Puebloans left the valley for destinations North.

In researching the Land Hill petroglyphs, one of the sources, Odyssey of the Pueblo Indians, by William M. Eaton, detailed several of the glyphs in the area. Many represent legends or religious or mythological figures. Others seem to represent specific clans, or basket designs or warriors. Still others have astronomical significance or alignments. And some appear to be… maps.

Here’s an example detailed in Eaton’s book. Now the shot I’m using here is not mine- I think this one we have yet to locate it.

Now in this pic I’ve overlaid the same shot with a topo map of the area, and highlighted many of the geographic features that Eaton IDs in his book.

The match isn’t perfect, and as Eaton notes, the Santa Clara River channel has changed over the thousand years since, but there does seem to be somewhat of a match. And Eaton includes several more map examples, including several down in Nevada, and another close by, downstream a few miles, just South of and below the St. George airport runway.

Side Note: Of course, once you see one map, you start to see them all over the place. Here’s an example- a boulder below the cliffs along the Santa Clara River (I’ve cranked up the exposure & contrast to bring out the glyphs in the shadow.)

Is this a map of this stretch of the river, or just a serpent* with some doo-dads?

*Maybe Balolokong, the Great Water Serpent in Pueblo Indian Mythology. Just a guess…

Saturday Awesome Wife had a massage appointment at Red Mountain Spa, so armed with Eaton’s description and crude map, I enlisted the Trifecta and set out in search of Eaton’s second map. Well, we didn’t find the map- or rather I’m not sure if we did, but what we did find was an Absolute Home Run, one that you absolutely have to check out on your next trip to St. George, and that I’m going to share with you Right Now.

There are great rock art sites all over the Colorado Plateau. But many of them are a pain in the ass to get to. One of the great things about the Land Hill site, as I’ve mentioned, is how easy it is to access. But this place is even easier. It’s a hillside chock-full of fantastic rock art, and it’s located- I kid you not- on the hillside immediately behind the St. George Maverik on Hilton Drive.

Seriously, this place is so easy to access, so close to the Interstate, that if you pass through St. George without spending 10 minutes to check it out it would be criminally negligent. We pulled into the Maverik lot and Twin B was the first to spot glyphs on the hillside. Here’s a shot- with no zoom- that I took from the lot; click on it and see how many you can pick out.

There are glyphs all over the hillside, and several cool panels. This boulder atop the hill (left, Bird Whisperer for scale) may be the most impressive, but scrambling along the hillside revealed a number of surprises not visible from below. Here’s one of my favorites; this panel (right, with my foot for scale) faces straight up. The map, which again I don’t think we found*, is thought to indicate the network of irrigation canals around 950AD. I should mention that this site is far from unique in the St. George area. Both the town, and neighboring Bloomington to the South, have all sorts of rock art sites, sometimes in the middle of suburban neighborhoods. What makes archeology in St. George so interesting is that a thriving modern community is smack-dab atop of a once-thriving ancient one.

*But I’m not sure. There are many indeterminate and worn “squiggle-glyphs” that could conceivably be maps of sorts.

Note for Non-North American Readers: Yes, I know, you’re thinking “So what? Every city in Europe is built atop of countless ancient sites…” But that’s not the case for us North Americans. We generally have to go to odd backcountry locations, out-of-the-way national parks, or down to Central America to see this kind of stuff.

The next morning I did my usual family vacation schtick of tip-toeing out before dawn to go mtn biking*. Off to the East, in the dawn gloom, shaded under a low cloud layer, I could see the flat table of Little Creek Mountain.

*I rode the “Rim” network- Rim Runner, Rim Rambler, Rim Reaper- just South of Barrel Roll, and accessed from the same trailhead. It was my first time and I’d rate it as OK but a little unexciting. Barrel Roll is a better ride.

As I mentioned earlier, Little Creek is filled with potshards and other signs of Indian use and occupation, but the earliest stuff dates from around 500AD (Basketmaker III)*. That’s a lot more recent than the evidence of Archaic period peoples down in the valley, and it might reflect later and more advanced cultures having the tools and technology to be able to utilize the higher mesas in ways the Archaics couldn’t. I think about that when I look up at Little Creek from St. George. If it’s true, then for thousands of years, the mesa was unknown. Countless generations would’ve lived their whole lives down in the valley, looking up at the high, dark, table to the East, as unknown to them as another planet would be to us.

*My main source here is the 1980 Master’s Thesis of James L. Heid, which I accessed (and copied) several years ago from the UNLV library. I’m sure more work has been conducted in the decades since, and so this info could well be wrong.

So the Puebloans did make maps after all. I thought about the Mesa. And I thought about that map. I need to go find it. I need to give Morgan a call.

Meep! Meep! Everything I Knew About Roadrunners I Learned From the Cartoon

Saturday morning I was biking with the Twins in St. George. No, we weren’t mountain biking; St. George, and neighboring Santa Clara have a wonderful networks of paved bike paths running all over the place. They pass through neighborhoods and pretty open spaces featuring slickrock outcrops, lava fields and shrubland, and are perfect for a parent who wants to bike with his kids while not worrying about traffic.

Here’s a quick clip of a typical stretch of path. Most of the shrubs along here are Thread Snakeweed, Gutierrezia microcephala (also called “Matchweed), Winterfat, Ceratoides lanata (also called “White Sage”), or Spiny Hopsage, Grayia spinosa.

Early on in the ride we spotted this- a Roadrunner* (pic below, right).

*They move fast and don’t sit still for long. As such, only this photo is mine.

We got a good look at him zipping about, and the early wildlife sighting got the ride off to a good start. Now, when we spot wildlife as a family, I always try to tell the kids something interesting about whatever it is we’re seeing. With Bird Whisperer this is getting tough; it’s likely he already knows more about any bird or mammal we see than I do. But with the Twins I can still usually manage to impart a new factoid or two. So I thought about Roadrunners and what I knew about them, and as I did so realized that I knew the following “facts”, all of which I had gleaned from watching ‘Roadrunner” cartoons in my formative years:

1- Roadrunners have 3 toes per foot, 2 facing forward, 1 backward (see pic right).

2- Roadrunner run faster than coyotes.

3- Roadrunners cannot fly.

4- Roadrunners are herbivorous, subsisting primarily on birdseed.

5- Roadrunners say, “Meep! Meep!”

6- Roadrunners inhabit Monument Valley, Canyonlands National Park, and other areas of the Colorado Plateau Semi-Desert, as evidenced by the numerous and frequent sandstone monoliths appearing in the cartoons*.

*And which frequently play a role in the demise of the pursuing coyote.

So as you can see, I knew quite a bit about Roadrunners. Unfortunately, every single one of those “facts” is flat-out wrong.

Tangent: Was anybody else besides me rooting for the coyote? I never sought out the cartoon; it was one of several packed into the “Loony Tunes” hour I watched religiously every Saturday morning growing up. When a Roadrunner segment would come on I’d wince. Because I knew what was going to happen: the coyote would never catch him, and would die- and apparently be reincarnated*- like 10 times while trying, and the roadrunner would never get caught and he would always be all smug and snarky-like about it. And it wasn’t like the coyote wasn’t trying; he’d get some big box delivered from Acme, Inc. and he’d be all excited, the way I am when a box of bike parts shows up in the mail, and he’d come up with some catapult or rocket or giant spring but it just never worked out- usually for no good reason. As a perennial mechanical hack, my sympathies were firmly with the coyote**.

*Really, what was up with that? Was the coyote supposed to be a metaphor for Jesus or something? Or maybe he was just a precursor to Kenny in South Park…

**And still are, despite that biting incident.

But I could never look away. It always turned out the same, but each time, some little voice inside my 10 year-old head would say, “Maybe, just maybe, he’ll catch him this time! I can’t break away to pee or get another bowl of Quisp now- this could be it! I might miss it!” But of course it never turned out any different, and I think another little piece of my fragile 10 year-old soul died with each episode. Man, I hated that f$@#ing bird.

Wow, I started this tangent thinking it would be all light and whimsical, but it turned out kind of Nietzsche-meets-Janis-Joplin. That’s the thing with tangents- when I start them I really have no idea where they’re going.

All About Roadrunners

But I know where this post is going. The Greater Roadrunner, Geococcyx californianus (pic right, not mine), is common to the Southwestern US and Northern Mexico. It’s actually a Cuckoo, or more specifically, one of the 142 species of bird comprising Cuculidae, the Cuckoo Family. There are cuckoos of one sort or another all over the world, on every continent except Antarctica. If you know anything about Cuckoos you probably may be familiar with them as brood parasites, sneakily laying their eggs in the nests of other species, but most of the cuckoos involved in that monkey business are Old World Cuckoos*. Geococcyx is one of 4 genera in the subfamily Neomorphinae, or New World ground-cuckoos, and the Greater Roadrunner is the only member of this subfamily found in the US.

*The common avian brood parasite around here is the Brown-Headed Cowbird, which is not a cuckoo at all and which we checked out during Bird Feeder Week last January.

Side Note: The Lesser Roadrunner, G. velox, looks almost identical but a little smaller. It lives down in Mexico in a couple different areas, including the Yucatan Peninsula. So if you go to Cancun and do a day-trip to Chichen Itza, keep an eye out while driving that (phenomenally boring*) toll road to get there.

*The Northern Yucatan is flat as a pancake and covered in dry, view-obscuring, scrub forest. Driving solo across the peninsula in a VW Bug without radio or CD player- as I did several years ago- is mind-numbingly dull…

This brings us to the first bad “fact”. Roadrunners don’t have 3 toes; they have 4. The inner 2 toes face forward, while the outer 2 face back. This arrangement, called Zygodactly, is common to all members of the Cuckoo family but is not (quite) unique to them. It also occurs in parrots, woodpeckers and owls and seems to be an effective foot-form for grasping trunks, branches and twigs.

With roadrunners it’s been adapted to running, and, true to the cartoon, that’s what roadrunners do, usually preferring a sprint to flying.

Where the cartoon gets it wrong on the running part is around the bird’s relation to coyotes, or predators in general. Roadrunners (pic left, not mine) can sprint up to 18 – 20 MPH, but a sprinting coyote can beat 30MPH. So the scenes you see in the cartoon of the coyote closing in on the roadrunner, then the roadrunner saying “Meep! Meep!” and then kicking in the afterburners and leaving Wile E. behind are bunch of baloney. In the real world, a roadrunner being chased by a coyote will just fly away. Roadrunners aren’t great flyers; they don’t do it well or far, but they can get airborne for a few minutes, which is often all it takes to evade an oncoming canine.

But roadrunners overwhelmingly run (or jump) (vs. fly) to hunt. And this brings us to the fourth bad “fact”: Roadrunners are omnivores, and aggressive, skilled hunters. They routinely hunt small rodents, scorpions, tarantulas and small reptiles, including- get this- rattlesnakes! No, they’re not immune to the venom, just fast. And clever. Roadrunners are usually solitary birds, but they’ll often pair up to take on a rattler. One will feint and distract the snake while the other goes in and nabs it behind the head with its beak.

Once caught, the roadrunner dispatches its prey by repeatedly bashing its head in against a rock. Not quite like the cartoon, eh?

Roadrunners also regularly hunt at or around suburban bird feeders, preying upon smaller birds like swifts and swallows. They’ve even been observed leaping up out of hiding and nabbing low-flying birds in mid-air!

Also unlike the cartoon is their call, which not only is not “Meep! Meep!”, but is not anything remotely like it. It’s a repeated “cooing” on a declining scale, reminiscent of a Mourning Dove, but with a sort of gurgling undertone, like it needs to clear its throat. You can listen to it here if you’re curious.

Side Note: Speaking of Mourning Doves, I got this nice shot of one down in St. George. Someday I’m doing a post on them.

OK, so that’s 5 “facts” down. The last “fact” is its range. I’m pretty sure you will never see a roadrunner zipping through Monument Valley or Arches NP, or pretty much any of the places depicted in the cartoon*. The roadrunner is a bird of hot deserts- the Mojave, Sonoran and Chihuahuan. As I mentioned in last Thanksgiving’s series on the amazing botany of St. George, Southwest Utah is completely unlike the rest of the state in that it dips down into the Northernmost reaches of the Mojave and that’s why it’s full of cool stuff you don’t see anywhere else in the state- stuff like creosote and Joshua trees and desert tortoises and several species of rattlesnake that don’t occur elsewhere in Utah. The Greater Roadrunner is another “Mojave Indicator”; you generally won’t see it outside of this area in the state. Occasionally one will be sighted just a bit out of its typical range; they sometimes show up in or around Cedar City or even Parowan and in 1932 a decomposing one was found outside of Provo(!), but they never breed so far North. Roadrunners are territorial, so it may be territory/population pressure that pushes them Northward every once in a while.

*In fairness, Saguaro cacti also frequently appeared in the cartoon. And though they don’t occur in the Southern-Utah-type canyonlands so often depicted in the cartoon, they are endemic to the Sonoran desert, where roadrunners do in fact live.

Side Note: The first roadrunner I ever saw was down in the Chihuahuan, driving across West Texas in the spring of 1990. It was crossing the highway. Less than 5 minutes later, a coyote ran across the highway, in the same direction. I thought, “Wow- just like the cartoon! I’m in the real West now!”

Yeah, so everything I “knew” about roadrunners was wrong. But if anything, they’re cooler than the cartoon- Roadrunners are fast, mean, clever, bold desert hunters. And there’s another thing that fascinates me about them: they’re an “in-between” thing.

When we think about other animals, we tend to categorize them. We think of animals as herbivores or carnivores, as little timid creatures, or big lumbering ones, or means and scary ones. And certainly we think of birds in different categories: waterfowl, raptors, little brown birds at our feeders, etc. But probably the biggest mental division we make among birds is between those who fly and those who don’t. We’re of course familiar with all sorts of birds that fly, and even if we don’t see them every day, we’re at least conceptually familiar with birds that don’t, such as ostriches and emus. But a roadrunner is in-between. We know of other in-between birds of course- chickens and quail and grouse and pheasants, but we tend to think of them as well, sort of lame. Like they would certainly want to fly, right? They just can’t seem to get it together… But a roadrunner- a fast, resourceful desert killer- clearly has its act together; there’s no way it’s “lame”. It’s not like other birds. It’s an in-between.

We think of in-betweens as transitional because we know that animals who live in environments and ways very different from their ancestral environments must have passed through such in-between stages in their evolutionary past. Here’s an example: whales. We know that whales and hippos shared a common ancestor sometime in the last 50-60 million years. And we know that that common ancestor was a 4-legged mammal that walked around on the land. But in-between that proto-hippo and modern whales there must have been some “in-between” ancestors. What would be an example? Well, maybe something like a seal or a sea lion. And what would be in between a seal and a whale? Well, maybe something like a manatee, or dugong.

What about the other way? What’s in-between a seal and something that walks around on land, like a dog or a cat or a rabbit? Maybe an otter? Or a beaver?

As it turns out, even though you can line them up along a spectrum of in-between-ness, none of these things- whale, seal, otter, manatee, are particularly closely-related to one another. But here they all are in front of us, appearing to fill out an almost continuous march to the sea.

But they’re not a continuum, and from their own perspectives, none of them is in-between anything. Some pinnipeds may someday evolve into more whale/fish-like forms, or maybe they’ll evolve the other way, back toward land-living. Or maybe they’ll keep on living like they do till the end of the world.

The animal world* is full of these kinds of in-betweens, with flying squirrels and loons (which can barely walk on land) and mud-skippers and amphibians. Ostriches descended from birds which evolved flight and then lost it, Vampire bats descended from flying mammals that evolved sonar and then lost the high-frequency component, and apes descended from reptiles who lost color vision and then re-evolved it. Evolution isn’t a continuous line; it’s a meandering, endless soap opera.

*So is the plant world, but that’s another post. So is fungi, a great example being yeast, who’ve apparently “lost” the multi-cellularity their ancestors evolved.

In the big picture, nothing’s really an in-between, because everything is. Certainly we- hairless, giant-headed, crazy-breeding, bipedal chimpanzees- are in no position to call anything an in-between.

Back To The Point I Was Trying To Make But Got Distracted From By Trying To Draw A Seal

So back to the roadrunner. It often strikes people as intuitively odd that birds would ever “give up” flight. If you could fly, why wouldn’t you keep flying? Many examples- most now sadly extinct- come from islands, where birds, lacking land-based predators, no longer needed to fly, resulting in such creatures as the Dodo, Raphus cucullatus, of Mauritius. Dodos (pic left, not mine) were part of Columbidae, the same family as pigeons and doves, and presumably evolved flightless-ness after some number of their flying ancestors wound up on the island. But other examples, such as the ratites- a group which includes ostriches, emus, cassowaries and rheas- apparently evolved flightless-ness on a continental landmass*. For whatever reason, running and greater size worked out to be a better deal for them than retaining flight capability.

*Which would be… yes, that’s right, Gondwanaland! I am telling you, that place was rocking!

Side Note: A bit of a head-scratcher for me are “island ratites”, such as the kiwi and now extinct moas of New Zealand and Elephant birds of Madagascar. These are/were ratites, and so presumably evolved flightless-ness prior to the break-up of Gondwanaland. (It’s pretty certain, from both fossil and modern physiological evidence*, that ratites were already flightless before the Southern supercontinent broke up.) But you have to wonder if, having wound up on island-sized Gondwanan fragments with an absence of predators, was the Dodo-effect then also at play in their continued evolution?

*Specifically, ratites lack a keel on their sternum upon which to anchor large wing muscles. So even if somehow an ostrich or an emu was endowed with giant wings and wing-muscles, its skeleton couldn’t support them.

Ratites are impressive birds, but none of the living species in the group are anywhere near carnivorous as roadrunners. And it makes you wonder, if we do think of the roadrunner as an in-between, what exactly is it in between? On one end of the spectrum are its cuckoo-cousins, but what lies on the other end of the spectrum of possibilities for a running avian carnivore?

Just a couple million- and maybe as recently as 15,000*- years ago, a 300+ lb carnivorous flightless running bird, Titanis walleri, roamed North America (drawing right, not mine). At 8’ tall, this was a top of the line carnivore- no coyote was chasing him around on rocket roller-skates. And T. Walleri wasn’t the first time a bird of that form and scale appeared. ~50 million years earlier, several Diatryma species (genus = Gastornis), at 6’ tall, appears to have led a similar lifestyle.

*How recently it became extinct is debatable.

Side Note: I mentioned both these birds back last January during Bird Feeder Week. (Man, was that a great week or what?)

So we know that 6’+ flightless avian carnivores evolved at least twice in North America. Though not at all closely-related to either of these prehistoric horrors, G. californianius is, to the best of my knowledge, the modern day North American bird closest in form and lifestyle to them. Makes you think twice about that cute little fella in the cartoon. Now maybe I know why I was rooting for the coyote.