All species › Kingfishers, bee-eaters and rollers
Kingfishers, bee-eaters and rollers | Coraciiformes
Scharrelaarachtigen | Coraciiformes
Colourful birds with a large head, short legs and a comparatively heavy, straight bill; much of the colour comes not from pigment but from the structure of the feather, so that it shifts with the light. The foot is syndactyl: the third and fourth toes are fused over part of their length, so it serves as a clamp for perching and is of little use for walking. They hunt from a fixed lookout — wait, dart out, return — and beat the prey dead against the perch before swallowing it. All of them breed in the dark, in a self-dug tunnel in a bank or a termite mound or in a cavity, without nest material, on round glossy white eggs, and the young hatch naked. In southern Africa the order consists of kingfishers, bee-eaters and rollers.
Families in this order
- Rollers | Coraciidae6 speciesStocky 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.
- Kingfishers | Alcedinidae15 speciesCompactly built birds with a large head, a long straight dagger of a bill, a very short tail and small syndactyl feet that are hardly walked on. They fish from a branch over the water or from a hover: the bird drops in head first, seizes the fish crosswise, stuns it against the perch and swallows it head first, bringing bones and scales back up as pellets. The flight is fast, low and dead straight over the water, on whirring wings. The nest is an unlined chamber at the end of a tunnel in a steep earth bank; the round white eggs lie on the remains of pellets, and the young carry their growing feathers for a long time in horny sheaths.
- Bee-eaters | Meropidae11 speciesSlender birds with a long, slightly downcurved pointed bill, pointed wings and often elongated central tail feathers; the flight alternates quick beats with long glides. They take their prey entirely on the wing and specialise in bees, wasps and other stinging insects: the catch is battered against the perch and the sting rubbed out of it before the insect is swallowed, after which the indigestible chitin comes back up as pellets. The nest lies at the end of a self-dug tunnel one to two metres long in a sand bank or in flat sandy ground, usually in a colony and often with non-breeding helpers assisting at the feeding of the young. Outside the breeding season too they stay in groups, feeding, resting and roosting pressed close together on wires and bare branches.