No Beep Beep, Barely Even a Cheep From Rogue Road Runner

A hitchhiking road runner--a member of a ground-bound species that usually lives within a two-mile radius of its hatching place--flew home by Delta Airlines jetliner Tuesday, ending a 24-day cross-country odyssey from Twentynine Palms to Wisconsin and back.

“He’s tired, somewhat confused, but appears to be quite strong,” said Ranger Ann Garry at Joshua Tree National Monument. “He will be fine and should be released in the next day or two.”

The road runner’s sojourn began when the long-tailed, crested member of the cuckoo family apparently hopped into a moving van rented by Marine Staff Sgt. Brian Cornett, 29, and his wife, Barbara, 26, and unwittingly went along for the 1,900-mile trip to Eau Claire, Wis., where Cornett had been reassigned.

The Cornetts had left the back of the van open the night before they were to leave and closed it early the next morning without knowing that the road runner was inside.

It took four days and nights for them to reach their destination. When they began unpacking furniture at their new home, the couple found the hungry, thirsty bird cowering in a corner of the van.

The Cornetts called the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. A game warden responded, caught the wayward desert dweller with a net and turned it over to Dr. Charles Kemper of Chippewa Falls, a 70-year-old physician, who said he once was successful in caring for an injured hawk by feeding it minnows.

Kemper kept the road runner in his home at night and in his enclosed patio during the day, offering it the tiny fish.

“The road runner took to the minnows like a duck to water,” Kemper said. “He ate as many as 15 a day.”

When news of the road runner spread, Kemper said, a steady stream of Chippewa Falls boys and girls came to see the wayward bird, more familiar to most of them as a Warner Bros. cartoon character that unfailingly eludes the elaborate attempts of a certain Wile E. Coyote to catch him.

“Seems like half the kids in town dropped by the house,” Kenper said. “They were all downright disappointed.

“No beep beeps.”

Although his feathered guest seemed to be thriving on minnows, Kemper wanted to find the bird a permanent home.

He called several zoos in Wisconsin and Minnesota, hoping to find a taker. But no one wanted a road runner.

Kemper even called the office of the Green Bay Packers and asked if the professional football players would take the road runner with them on a trip west and release it on the Arizona desert.

“They turned me down,” he said.

Finally, Kemper called Garry. They agreed that it was in the road runner’s best interest to be returned whence he came.

Frank Sorrentino, one of Kemper’s friends and patients, drove the road runner from Chippewa Falls 90 miles to the airport in Minneapolis and put it on the flight.

The road runner flew home in an animal carrier stowed in the baggage compartment, a 5 1/2-hour flight that included a stopover at Salt Lake City.

Garry was waiting at Palm Springs Airport to have the bird’s health checked by Robert Delacy, an expert on desert birds at Copper Mountain College in Joshua Tree, before returning the long-distance traveler to its two-mile patch of desert.