My friend Elaine lives in the Sonoran Desert in Southern Arizona in the US, while I live on Warderick Wells Cay in the Bahamas. Even though we’re over two thousand miles apart, we share a family of birds. I like to have an occasional adventure and when I was visiting the Leon Levy Preserve on Eleuthera recently, I saw a magnificent bird, the Great-Lizard Cuckoo, in a tree. PHEW! I usually see these birds on the ground running. When you’re a lizard, seeing a running cuckoo can be terrifying! They eat lizards, you know.
Watching the cuckoo run, I realized I had seen something similar in a video my friend Elaine sent me. In the Sonoran Desert and many other places, there’s a bird that runs just like my Great-Lizard Cuckoo. That’s because the Roadrunner is a member of the Cuckoo family.
![photo of Greater Roadrunner in the Sonoran Desert](https://elaineapowers.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Roadrunner-1024x619.jpg)
![illustration of a desert roadrunner](https://elaineapowers.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Dont-Fly-4-x-4-300-dpi-1005x1024.jpg)
Cuckoos are found on all the continents except Antarctica and they’re all magnificent. I’m so glad my friend and I can both enjoy these wonderful birds. If you want to learn more about Elaine’s Roadrunner, check out her book Don’t Make Me Fly! It’s all about the roadrunner and it’s lots of fun because it’s written in rhyme.