- The European roller breeds in open woodlands across Europe and Central Asia and migrates as far as 10,000 kilometers to Africa each year.
- Since 2024, a nascent project of BirdLife South has been investigating the birds’ migration routes and stopover sites.
- The European Roller Monitoring Project aims to identify valuable or vulnerable habitat and build the international relationships that can support the protection of this and other species.
The European roller is a small, striking migratory bird that breeds in open woodlands — or farms and orchards — across Europe and Central Asia.
Coracias garrulus is also well-known to Southern and South Africa’s avid birdwatching communities, including many citizen scientists who participate in the Southern African Bird Atlas Project.
But the rollers that spend November to March in South Africa appear to be mostly the C. g. semenowi subspecies. The routes these populations follow to their breeding grounds as far as 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) away in Central Asia are not known.
Since 2024, scientists at BirdLife South Africa have fit tiny 3.8-gram (0.1-ounce) trackers to seven birds to investigate the birds’ migration routes and stopover sites.
The tagged rollers traveled north through Tanzania and Kenya, paused in Somalia, and then flew on to Central Asia via Oman and India. One individual ended up in China, two others in Uzbekistan.
One year’s tracking of just seven birds has connected South Africa to bird clubs in Gujarat, India, and a Chinese researcher studying the rollers’ breeding behavior in Xinjiang, China.
BirdLife SA’s tiny staff dedicated to the European Roller Monitoring Project is supported by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The tracking devices are paid for by individual donors.
In the years ahead, Flyway and Migrants Project Manager Jessica Wilmot wants the European roller to become a flagship species that can help identify valuable or vulnerable habitat, and build the international relationships that can support their protection.
Banner image: A European roller in Bo’stonliq, Uzbekistan. Image by bereskletic via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Up to half the bird species using the African-Eurasian flyway are declining
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This story first appeared on Mongabay
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