Roadrunner travels from Las Vegas to Maine as an accidental stowaway in a moving van

When a man packed up his life in Las Vegas and moved nearly 3,000 miles away to Maine, he accidentally brought a stowaway roadrunner with him.

A bird rehabilitation center in Maine was contacted Nov. 13 after a man named Gary opened his rental moving van and found a big bird inside.

“Gary and his son Brian were unloading the van at a storage facility in Westbrook when they discovered a stowaway – a Greater Roadrunner, a species native to the American Southwest,” Avian Haven, one of the largest rehabilitation centers in New England for birds, said in a Nov. 14 Facebook.

The bird was hiding in the front of the van’s storage area when a volunteer arrived to help it. The man had to force the roadrunner toward the back of the van.

The volunteer then netted the bird and transported it to the rehabilitation center.

“The roadrunner was in remarkably good shape for having been confined in the van for four days, leading us to wonder if perhaps some food items had also stowed away,” the center said. “Our first priority … was stabilization and provisioning.”

Greater roadrunners are about the size of a crow, according to The Cornell Lab. They can weigh between about 8 and 19 ounces.

Center workers don’t know if the stowaway roadrunner is a male or female because they don’t know how much weight the bird could have lost during its four-day journey.

The roadrunner, however, was “eating well” while at the center, and was moved to a habitat at the center while caretakers plan what to do next.

The center’s Rehabilitation Manager Chelsey Gundlach has experience caring for roadrunners.

Another long road trip back to Las Vegas likely wouldn’t be the best option for the bird, center officials said. However, they hope to send the bird back home where it hopped into the van.

“Of course we are exploring options for returning the roadrunner to Las Vegas,” the rehabilitation center said. “The first step is conversations with Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and its agency counterpart in Nevada.”

This story was originally published November 16, 2021 at 3:42 PM with the headline "Roadrunner travels from Las Vegas to Maine as an accidental stowaway in a moving van."