Dinner Is Served
Sonoran Desert · 6 min read
On the twenty-minute call of a hungry roadrunner chick, and the parent that answered.
Some wildlife moments last only a fraction of a second. Others require hours of patience. This one asked for both.
I had marked the nest two weeks earlier without ever getting closer than eighty yards. It was tucked into the arms of a cholla the size of a small car, invisible from every angle except one narrow line of sight that ran between two mesquites.
The chick had a voice like a rusty gate. When the parent came back — every ninety minutes or so — it would call as if the world were ending. The desert would fall silent around it, in the way that only a desert can, and then the answer would come: a soft, dry click that seemed to arrive from every direction at once.
This frame is the exchange itself. A lizard as long as the chick was, hanging in the air between two open beaks, held for perhaps a fifth of a second. The chick swallowed it whole. It looked, for a moment, like a small dinosaur that had made a terrible mistake.
There is a lesson in this picture that I keep coming back to. The most extraordinary things in nature almost never happen where we expect them to. They happen quietly, off the trail, at the exact moment we have almost decided to leave.