Seeing a roadrunner
A roadrunner is a desert cuckoo that runs about 20 miles an hour and leaves X-shaped footprints that hide which way it went. Your own trail can be just as hard for other people to read.
What it may mean
A roadrunner dashing across a desert road looks like a cartoon come to life, and the cartoon got one thing right: this ground cuckoo can run about 20 miles an hour, fast enough to catch lizards, scorpions and young rattlesnakes. Its footprints hold a small riddle. Two toes point forward and two point back, so each print in the sand forms an X, and someone reading the trail cannot easily tell which way the bird went. People leave tracks like that too. A friend who keeps changing plans, a manager who never says where a project is headed, or you, halfway through a decision you have not shared, can leave everyone nearby studying an X. To cartoon fans the bird is a joke, to birders a prize, to New Mexico its state bird, and to itself a hunter that knows exactly where it is going.
Depending on how you saw it
A roadrunner with a lizard
A roadrunner that catches a lizard or a mouse often beats it against a rock before swallowing it whole, sometimes headfirst. Tough food gets softened first. Which hard job do you break down before you take it on?
Running instead of flying
Roadrunners can fly in short bursts, but they nearly always choose to run, saving their wings for a quick leap onto a fence or a low branch. Which ability of yours do you save for emergencies and seldom use?
A courting pair
In spring a male roadrunner courts with a gift, holding out a lizard or a bit of food to the female while he bows and wags his tail. The offer matters more than the speech. What do you offer the people you love when words would not do the job?
Why it happens in nature
The greater roadrunner is a ground-living cuckoo of the deserts and dry scrub of the southwestern United States and Mexico. It can fly but prefers to run, reaching about 20 miles an hour, and it eats insects, scorpions, lizards, small mammals and young rattlesnakes. Each foot has two toes pointing forward and two back, which leaves X-shaped tracks.
To reflect on
Do the people around you know which way you are heading, or do your tracks read like an X?