THE ROAD RUNNER by Wyman Meinzer...

THE ROAD RUNNER by Wyman Meinzer (Texas Tech University Press: $19.95; 104 pp., paperback original). Thanks to Chuck Jones and his madcap animators at Warner Bros., the Road Runner is inextricably linked to the phrase “Beep-beep” in the popular imagination. Meinzer spent years studying and photographing the real bird, a large member of the cuckoo family. His affectionate study explains how road runners behave during hunting, courtship, grooming, parenting, etc.; he also documents the way they kill venomous snakes in a series of extraordinary photographs.