Plymouth Road Runner

The greater roadrunner is a ground cuckoo, and it is one of the most alarming birds in North America.

It runs at speeds around twenty-five miles per hour. It kills rattlesnakes — properly, routinely — by seizing them behind the head, and then beating them against the ground or a rock until the skull fails. Sometimes two birds work together, one distracting while the other strikes. It eats lizards, scorpions, small mammals and other birds. It has been observed killing venomous prey substantially longer than itself.

Warner Bros. built a cartoon around it in which the bird is a serene, blameless victim of a coyote’s ingenuity, and everyone in the world under the age of eighty now believes the roadrunner is fundamentally harmless.

And this is how it entered the Ophidiary. In 1968 Plymouth wanted a cheap, fast, unadorned muscle car for buyers priced out of the GTX. It licensed the cartoon — fifty thousand dollars, plus a further sum for the right to reproduce the “beep beep” as a horn note, which Chrysler engineers duly built — put bench seats and rubber flooring in a Belvedere body, fitted a 383 as standard and made a 426 Hemi available, and sold vastly more than it expected.

So the sequence runs: a bird that beats snakes to death on rocks, becomes a cartoon that beats no one, becomes a horn, becomes a badge on the cheapest fast car in America. Four steps from predation to a decal.

The Ophidiary’s note is simply this: of every adversary in Book V, the roadrunner is the one that actually does it. The mongoose is famous for a fight it usually wins. Apollo is a myth. The owl is opportunistic. But somewhere in the Sonoran desert, right now, a bird with a cartoon licensing history is holding a rattlesnake by the neck and swinging.