Rollers | Coraciidae

Scharrelaars | Carracas

Stocky birds with a large head, short legs and a heavy straight bill with a slightly hooked tip, used to seize large insects, scorpions, lizards and small vertebrates. The blue and turquoise of the plumage rests largely not on pigment but on the structure of the feather, so the colour shifts with the light and a perched bird can look dull until it takes wing and the wing shows a panel of bright cobalt to azure. The two genera of southern Africa hunt in different ways: the species with the longer, dark bill hunt by waiting, sitting for hours on a dead branch, a post or a wire, then dropping briefly to the ground and returning to the same perch, where the prey is battered; the species with the short, broad, yellow bill hunts in the air, chiefly at dusk and over swarms of emerging termites, in wheeling, bat-like flight. The family owes its name to the display flight: the bird climbs and then lets itself fall, tipping and tumbling sideways, calling loudly and harshly. The nest is an unlined hole in an old tree or a tunnel in a bank, holding two to four round white eggs.