30 January 2024: Day 12, Livingstone, Zambia — Street Pupil Southern Africa Birding Safari. Click on right here to peer (most often) the place I’m nowadays.
Bee-eaters and rollers are each individuals of the Order Coraciiformes that incorporates kingfishers, motmots, and todies. They all have colourful plumage, massive heads, brief necks, brief legs, and generally syndactyly feet. In different phrases, two in their 3 pointing-forward feet (feet #3 and #4) are fused on the base.
Right here’s what syndactyly seems like on a Ecu bee-eater and a lilac-breasted curler.
Birds on this Order actually have a conduct in commonplace: They slam or thrash their prey onto laborious surfaces to disarm or incapacitate them.
You’ve more than likely observed a kingfisher beat a fish to demise. Watch this southern carmine bee-eater (Merops nubicoides) slam a bee.
Rollers get their title for his or her aerial acrobatic performances throughout courtship or territorial flights. They’re steadily in the similar habitat as bee-eaters as a result of they each nest in mudbanks.
The lilac-breasted curler (Coracias caudatus) is each photographer’s dream. No longer best is he very colourful and as giant as a crow however he’s prepared to perch prominently for a very long time.
Like different Coraciiformes they slam their meals, too.
(credit and hyperlinks are within the captions)