Susan J. Tweit is a scientist who evolved into an award-winning writer and radio commentator. She is the author of five books for adults, including Barren, Wild, & Worthless: Living in the Chihuahuan Desert, personal stories about the history and natural history of Southern New Mexico, The Great Southwest Nature Factbook, a browser's guide to nature in the Southwest, from A to Z, and Seasons in the Desert: A Naturalist's Notebook, from Chronicle books. She has also written two children's books, Meet the Wild Southwest: Land of Hoodoos & Gila Monsters (Alaska Northwest Books) and City Foxes, a picture book which was named one of the Outstanding Science Books for Children for 1998.
Her "Wild Lives" radio commentaries are heard three times weekly on KRWG-FM, Southern New Mexico public radio, and her columns run in the Las Cruces Sun News. Susan's essays and stories have appeared in Harrowsmith Country Life, New Mexico, Sierra, Cricket, Bloomsbury Review, and other magazines. She is the co-founder of Las Cruces' wildly popular - and fun - Border Book Festival. She is currently living in Colorado with her husband, Richard Cabe, and dog, Perdida Imelda.
Susan is a popular public speaker and leader of workshops. Her stories of our natural and human history have captivated a wide variety of audiences, including school classes, workshops, banquets, and professional meetings. As Bloomsbury Review put it, she brings the precision of a scientist and the passion of a poet, and is able to refocus readers' vision and ignite their imaginations.
Susan has a new web site! She invites you to come visit. Her books are available there, at local bookstores, or on-line through http://BarnesandNoble.com and http://Amazon.com (search by author for Susan Tweit).
 |
I agree. Our state bird, a ground-dwelling speedster, is superbly adapted to desert conditions, thriving despite scarce water, fierce summer heat, chill winters, wide day-to-night temperature swings, and food armed with spines, venom and stinging hairs.
Roadrunners use sophisticated technology to cope with the harsh climate. Unlike other year-round desert residents, they remain active through both hot and cold months. Each morning last winter, one perched on our fence with its back turned to the sun, dropped its tail, spread its wings, and lifted the speckled feathers on its back, exposing a "solar panel" of jet black skin. By heating their bodies with solar energy, roadrunners reduce their caloric needs by as much as 40 percent. During hot late-summer days, I see the roadrunner only in the cooler morning and evening. Since birds cannot sweat, it takes to the shade during mid-day and compresses its plumage to retain less heat. When air temperatures climb above their 100+ body temperature, roadrunners, like humans, turn to evaporative cooling: they vibrate their throat lining to move air past the moist tissues in their respiratory systems; the resultant evaporation cools their bodies from within.
Roadrunners' speed and agility allows them to catch venomous tarantulas, scorpions and centipedes without harming themselves; they also eat insects, lizards, small birds, cactus fruit and seeds. They rarely fly, instead sprinting as fast as 15 miles per hour across the desert. The roadrunner that I watch often catches lizards in our garden, snatching them and, since it lacks teeth, swallowing them whole. What doesn't fit hangs out of its mouth (like a child eating spaghetti!), the excess swallowed as the first digests. It also plucks dog food from a dish in the neighbor's yard.
To encourage these desert characters to visit your yard, cultivate untidiness: leave tall "weeds" or native shrubs for shade, and build a small rock pile to attract lizards for them to hunt. (A tidy, manicured yard lacks habitat for many of the things that wildlife eat.) Also, keep your pets inside or corralled in other parts of the yard. If you are lucky, wildness, in the form of the roadrunner's curious stalking strut, will grace your yard.