Rollers | Coraciidae

Stocky birds with a large head, short legs and a heavy straight bill with a slightly hooked tip, used to seize large insects 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. They hunt by waiting: hours on a dead branch, a post or a wire, then a short drop to the ground and back to the same perch, where the prey is battered before it is swallowed. Their name comes from the display flight — the male climbs and then lets himself fall, tipping and tumbling sideways, calling loudly. The nest is a hole in an old tree or a tunnel in a bank, without nest material, holding round white eggs.