Indian Roller

Fascinating facts about the Indian Roller

• The Indian roller is named for something you will almost never see it do sitting still: the courtship display that gives the whole family its name. A male climbs high, then throws himself into a tumbling, twisting free-fall, rolling shoulder over shoulder while flashing the electric blue of his wings, and pulls out barely above the ground. Perched, he is a soft dusty brown. In that dive he is one of the most violently blue birds in Asia.
• Its colours are a trick of physics rather than pigment. There is no blue dye in a roller's feather. Microscopic structures in the barbs scatter short wavelengths back at you, so the bird is only blue when light hits it from the right angle — which is why a roller that looks drab on a roadside wire detonates into colour the instant it opens its wings.
• It is one of the great opportunists of the Indian dry season. Rollers gather at the edges of grass fires and follow tractors down ploughed fields, snatching the grasshoppers, crickets and beetles flushed out ahead of the flames and blades. A single bird will sit on the same favoured wire or bare branch for hours, dropping onto prey on the ground and carrying it back to the same perch to beat it senseless before swallowing.
• It is the state bird of three Indian states — Odisha, Karnataka and Telangana — and is bound up with Hindu tradition as a bird sacred to Vishnu. Seeing one on Dussehra is held to be a good omen. That reverence once cost the species dearly: rollers were caught and released at festivals in such numbers that the practice had to be discouraged.
• For decades the Indian roller was treated as one wide-ranging species stretching from Arabia to Vietnam. Genetic and plumage work split it in 2018: the birds east of Bangladesh, with their darker faces and different call, are now the separate Indochinese roller. The Indian roller proper is the bird of the subcontinent, and the split quietly made it a narrower endemic than anyone had assumed.

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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