Indian Roller

Fascinating facts about the Indian Roller

• At just 30-34 cm long with a 65-74 cm wingspan and a weight of only 166-176 g, the Indian roller is a compact powerhouse. Its dazzling blue flight feathers aren't pigment-based; they arise from microscopic barbs that scatter light, a trick first noted by C.V. Raman in the 1930s. Modern studies in 2010 revealed those barbs are channels packed with β-keratin rods just 100 nm wide, creating air-filled nanostructures that reflect vivid blue. This structural coloration lets the bird flash eye-catching hues in a split second in the open landscapes it frequents.
• Beetles dominate the Indian roller's menu, making up roughly 45 % of what it eats, with grasshoppers and crickets adding another 25 %. When swarms of winged termites rise, up to 40 rollers can line a 70 m (230 ft) stretch of power line to snap them up, turning a simple wire into a bustling hunting arena.
• Indian rollers are fiercely protective of their nests. They actively chase away Indian jungle crows and have even been recorded dive-bombing an Egyptian vulture, a predator many birds would simply avoid. Humans are not spared; rollers will swoop at people that come too close.
• The Indian roller is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (2016), reflecting its broad distribution and apparently growing numbers. In 2015, surveys estimated about 2,500 breeding pairs in Iraq and 15,000 pairs across the Arabian Peninsula, with notable increases in the United Arab Emirates. These figures show that, despite habitat changes, the species remains common.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia

At a glance

About the Indian Roller

The Indian roller is the bird you see from the window of every Indian train: a stocky, crow-sized shape hunched on a telegraph wire above dry fields, apparently brown and unremarkable, watching the ground. It belongs to a family of tropical Old World birds built around one habit, dropping from a high perch onto insects, lizards, frogs and scorpions below. What sets the roller apart is what happens when it moves. The wings open on bands of turquoise and deep cobalt that seem to belong to another bird entirely, and in the breeding season the male turns that colour into a display, climbing and then hurling himself through a rolling, wing-flashing dive. It is common across the plains of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, at home in farmland, scrub, open woodland and the edges of towns, and it has lived alongside people so long that Indian farmers, festivals and three state emblems have all made room for it.

Indian Roller photographed on Feravox

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