From late August to early November, I made a wandering tour of the United States. I hit 31 states and covered 15,000 miles. I saw some wonderful birds along the way - egrets in the Arkansas River in Wichita, Pelicans in the Missouri at Great Falls, and Sandhill Cranes in a freeway cloverleaf at Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. I think I saw a golden eagle outside Tomahawk, Wisconsin, but the jury is out on that.
But I really wanted to see three animals on this trip, and I didn't do very well:

• A Mountain Goat (I went to Glacier National Park, but the only mountain goat I saw was a stuffed one in a museum in Great Falls
• An Armadillo (I saw 3 roadkill armadillos in the south, but no live ones)
• A roadrunner. That was the big one. I drove through a lot of desert, but didn't see a roadrunner I could positively identify. I think that three times I saw a flash across the road that was most probably a bird, but that's all I could see. Is that all you see with them - a blur? I met two women at Chiricahua National Monument in Arizona and expressed my disappointment to them, and they exclaimed that they had seen a roadrunner on a nearby post just ten minutes earlier. I went there, and saw nothing. So, friends, tell me, what do you see when you see a roadrunner? Should I expect something more than the blur I saw?

I did see a rattlesnake and a couple alligators, so that was cool.
-Joe-