Two toes head forward and two toes backward, forming a bird track used by Hopi Indians in ceremonial design to confuse the evil spirits. The museum s Cornett, however, thinks the real reason we love roadrunners so much is because they eat all the things we hate. These birds kill tarantulas, black widow spiders, scorpions and rattlesnakes and then swallow them whole. They also hunt down centipedes, spiders, mice and rats. In fact, a roadrunner will eat anything it can kill and slip down its throat.
Roadrunners have the image of a cute little cartoon, but in reality they are some vicious hunters.
They ll pull a mouse from the weeds and then run over to the nearest rock or piece of wood and beat the thing to death. They ll rip the legs off a tarantula and swallow the center. With rattlesnakes they re especially cagey. Cornett watched a sidewinder strike at a roadrunner one day and the bird caught the serpent in mid-strike, grabbed its top jaw so tightly that the snake couldn t use its fangs. Then it whipped the snake over and over on the ground, eventually breaking the spinal column in five or six places.