Rollers of Fortune

A lot of birders grew up around industrial towns, many like me, near the cold grey Atlantic, in the north western quarter of Europe. Here for over half our days, through fully seven months of each Lilac-breasted Roller: Photo Martin Goodeyyear, suffocating grey opaqueness obliterated the blueness of the sky, separating us from the heaven above.

I think that is why, for some child birders of the seventies, the Roller, together with other 'southern' birds from the middle pages of our Peterson's Guide (let's not forget Guy Mountfort and Phil Hollom) birds like the Kingfisher, the Bee-eater, the Hoopoe and the Golden Oriole became totems, symbols of optimism. So colourful and yet Real European birds. Glowing with warmth, freedom personified and proof (to spite the grey uniformity of town and school) that life was well worth living. To this day, even living as I do now in the riotous exhuberance of Equatorial Africa, just catching a glimpse of the vibrant, sky blues of our roller never fails to spark a thrill in that child's heart within. Although I was in fact already seventeen before, at long last, I met the roller-being in question.

Vejer de la Frontera, southern Andalucia. A bright Sunday morning at Easter 1973.

Lucky us! We had just flown-in Iberia from Manchester, while he of course had made it by himself, very recently arrived from exotic African lands. I was on a manic early listing mission; though he was much more focused, carefully scanning the open ground beneath his telegraph wire for trundling dung and darkling beetles. Oily black insects caught out in the open, crossing the soft warm earth of rabbit mounds, along a lumpy limestone lane.

Along that village track, beside one of Franco's own great wheat fields, bloomed an unruly renaissance of brilliant buzzing Easter flowers. Legumes mostly; deep blue vetches and blood red Italian sainfoin, surpassed only by the whispering pagan spires of purple viper's bugloss, almost knee high in the verge. Humming, smiling, they were witness to grumpy old ladies, robed in colourless black, who hurried past squint-eyed, up the steep lane, to those bells of a Roman gong.

My next roller meeting became as indelible as the first. Another in-bound April migrant, it was in an ancient olive grove, on a sun-drenched hillside, beside the hazy blue Adriatic in northern Corfu two years later. I was still dizzy after my first ever encounter with a male Pallid Harrier; a silent ballet in bright white sunshine who had just floated past me on the softest of spring breezes, both of us crossing a wet-footed field of tiny, white and wild narcissus. The budding wayside elms and rufous Nightingales were still ringing in my eyes and ears when I decided to take a drier short cut 'home', through a stony maquis-thicket, into those scattered twisted olives. And there was the Roller, on a bare grey antler branch etched against the sky. Thickset, powerful, a square-headed bird with a serious beak and sharply knowing eye, a distillation of blues and rufous tan, and then in a wonderfully reckless flight yet more blues, ecstatic indigos, simply beauty beyond belief.

For a youthful naturalist (currently a shrinking minority and increasingly impoverished, in our rich northern societies) it might be the simultaneous stimulation of all our senses that almost seems to crystallize and thereby fasten such memories. This Serves to ensure our allegiance to Nature, so that we will for ever require and seek out the wonder and yes! the glory in nature. Searching for "most wanted birds", whether they be rollers or any desired 'species', can expose one's inner egoistic-conversational world to the subtle yet fundamental forces of the outer living world - nature as the great reality: all around, impinging on you, from all sides, from underfoot and overhead.

It's a thoroughly active, dynamic meditation, made of many parts.

First off: through the physical exertion required just by being on the nature quest itself. The repeated concentration: painstakingly won, lost and regained. The perseverance in spite of intrusive discomfort. The physical progress and process: walking, as quietly as possible, behaving carefully in sunshine, wind or rain.

Secondly there is the wealth of external stimuli themselves. The smells ascending - e.g. those of the healthy earth, blend with the actions - as when one weaves among the flowering clumps and shrubs thereby releasing and sensing their nectar. Sound: the observer is pausing amid the truly 'mundane' hum of bees and wasps; the sights - fluttering butterflies in softly greening shafts of dappled sunlight; the sounds, incomparably evocative bird calls, as from diurnal migrants (I am recalling European Bee-eaters!) passing unseen overhead.

It is a full immersion in Nature. The human mind becoming sufficiently aware to feel the unique magic in any wholesome place and in that very moment sensing what it is to be so fully alive - a human being at ease with itself in the moment.

Thirty two years on from 1975 , in deepening middle age, any essential, transcendent moment of reverie, such as those I attempt to sketch here, are increasingly likely to be blocked by my adult attachments to ecological thinking and environmental fear.

I worry about what has happened, and what will happen next (and more especially why), to the blue skies roller, our European Roller and those sunshine birds of my youth?

We know that many breeding birds were already in retreat from the north and west of Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. One hundred years later and their ranges have contracted a great deal further, so that by summer 2007 'potentially healthy populations' of many probably survive only eastward from the centre of the European peninsula. It is by no coincidence that healthy populations of these species remain today only in what was known back in the 1970s as Communist Eastern Europe.

Ironically in the early-1970s conventional ornithological thinking in Britain and elsewhere blamed nearly all such bird declines on climate change; a supposed trend across western Europe to cooler springs and wetter summers; precipitating a decline in the populations of large insects upon which these birds depend. Whilst no doubt partly true, thirty years later we are witnessing similar declines and range contractions in 'far-less demanding', once very common and widespread, insectivores - everyday birds (in the 1960s and 70s) such as the Spotted Flycatcher Muscicapa striata and Willow Warbler Phylloscopus trochilus. Focusing on the effects of climate change is of course far more compelling today than it was then. And although undeniable (at long last) this awesome fact should not allow us to escape admitting that a pandemic of land mismanagement and the abuse of nature itself, fuelled by human greed and unrestrained freedom of choice, really is the root cause of our environmental woes.

In the aforementioned "Peterson Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe (sic!)" in its second and third editions, (this was the bible of the 1970s rarity hunter, hitching twitcher on the by-pass, many an apprentice world mega-lister), the nesting habitat of European Roller was summarised so lightly and succinctly by Phil Hollom as:

"Mature forests and fairly open country with a few trees. Breeds in old hollow trees, holes in banks, ruins etc."

To reproduce in this 'habitat' rollers obviously need to eat well, so they require lots of large insects for themselves and for their four or five young. A roller's diet is composed of Isopteran alates (i.e. flying termites - and these are not available in Europe), Orthopterans (crickets, katydids, grasshoppers and locusts), Coleopterans (beetles) and Hymenopterans (bees and wasps) also small vertebrates such as Lacerta lizards and very small mammals and birds. And they need safe nest sites: Black Woodpecker (Dryocopus martius) holes, and fine old trees where a limb has fallen-away, rubbly cliffs and earthy banks, or the walls of old buildings and ruins, and nowadays human-made nest boxes.

Further Rollers, old and young, also have to survive the winter and return again next spring. Practically the entire population of Coracias g. garrulus (and C. g. semenowi the eastern 'subspecies') spend the boreal winter travelling down through Africa and back, so there are the many inevitable dangers of a migrant's life during the seven months of the year in which a European Roller is an African Roller once again.

So one might ask how many descendants of those mid-70s western rollers are returning now, steadily crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean, to the European Community this Easter?

Rollers returning 'home' to what? In so doing they will define how little remains of what has been re-defined and relegated to 'environmentally-sensitive' countryside (sic! - indeed). In the European Community of communities I've known the centuries-old, 'mature' farmed landscapes that functioned quite well even into the 1970s have in only twenty five years been earth-moved into scattered reservations where redundant human life-styles and "Species of European Conservation Concern" cling to an existence, no longer viable without the nostalgia of modernity and finance from beyond the fence.

Not one roller I'll wager shall utter its throaty rattle, in simply gorgeous tumble-round display, above those vast twenty-something "farms" the two thousand hectare swathes of squared-off agri-productive land (read sterile waste): the biological deserts of dressed-grain, of oil seed-rape and regimented clear-fell spruce-for-pulp; and those insidiously accumulating ranks of silage bags that, having reached the Atlantic beaches, turned about and now march ever eastward across the Union. The Rollers are falling as surely as their pest, or pest-like, food supply in front of the the petro-chemical blitzkreig of the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) designed to benefit the new elite - and at most 25% of Europe's switched-on farmer loyalists.

Sour-smelling or scentless, these intensive lands are increasingly assimilating the few half-forgotten corners north, south, east and west. Whilst along the lanes, the eutrophic drains and fallen hedges only despised insurgent weeds like Polygonum, Rumex and Urtica are gaining ground, assisted by the airborne nitrate haze they rise-up resistant, unruly and rank.These few superweeds are quite fittingly - the dark flowers for our desperate times. The temporary set-aside, the subsidised and sterilized so-called fields, reinforced by liberalized land tenure laws that favour only agri-business, obliterate our land. Land, that nowadays, is rarely visited by ordinary folk and only very occasionally by the fat beneficiaries themselves - those dark-suited or white-coated men of the subspecies Homo ignoramus entrepreneurialis.

In the palm-top profitable countryside of a supposedly so-affluent Europe are there many healthy areas remaining in which rollers can hope to breed? Areas that we would wish to 'pass-on' to our children? In the expanded Union of 2007? Three thousand pairs of rollers, fifty, ten, when none?

In thirty years a manufactured need for ever cheaper food-in-plastic, linking the base production industries (our staples) of wood and grain and meat and milk to the wealth of General Oil, has desecrated what remained in 1970 of the Roller's habitat west of 25 degrees East. And with it the lives of a great proportion of those trans-Saharan migrant birds for whom some still think Europe home. In fairness it was probably done without much awareness, by a stupid crass brutality in the traumatised wake of great european wars; beyond our contemporary understanding and without the people's consent. Unwitting perhaps, yet many of us who lived through it knew they were disappearing, so arguments apportioning responsibility will probably drag on. Anyway we consumer-naturalists have lost the bulk of them. Killed-them-off as surely as if we had shot them down ourselves.

It is not just the scientist-ornithologist, simple nature-lover, nor eccentric naturalist who suffers the demise of Roller-land. I believe we need (and now need to recreate) the grazed and wooded parklands, the muddles of heath and corn, ancient meadow-forest mosaics and new versions of old cultural landscapes that otherwise risk surviving beyond today only as open air museums, in old memories, in monochrome - petrified and flat, two dimensional images locked in celluloid. Acquiescing in this accelerating extirpation, we are loosing something ineffable, more precious to our humanity I believe than religions and rollers. We are loosing our sense of belonging to nature, of continuity with nature, the spirit of human communality with land, true freedoms these; the freely-given knowledge that an ordinary life is worth living. Living well - outside the box.

In Europe today many privileged child hood freedoms dwell within a moulded black or silver plastic box; on a screen (not face) that encapsulates electronic fantasies played-out on cartoon planets, crafted within the crowded mega-cities that have of late so deeply absorbed our minds. I know that the youth today, as always and quite naturally, should prefer their fantasies to those with which we lived yet cannot now describe. However it seems to me that a civilization which requires such tranquillising pass-times as these has evolved together with a wider landscape of expanding sterility and increasing conformity. Corporate-sponsored monotony, in its present form, may soon be seen as being as rapacious and inimical to the natural human spirit as was any supposedly fearsome forest, the fields of feudal or fascist wheat, or the state collective farms in Soviet Russia. Insidious and spiritually stifling, highly mechanised, oil-dependent agriculture delivers our daily bread to domestic terminal consumers who seldom see a cereal field without an intervening pane of glass; and have no idea whatsoever how an ancient forest might look.

And as regards a take on sub-Saharan lands ... "as long as it doesn't come here, who cares really?"

This thankfully brings me back to rollers past - and our past - and to "insolent, insoluble Africa" with its 'ten types' of Roller.

East of about 25 degrees East the European Roller may survive for a while yet. As with many bird species, of a primarily west-central palearctic origin, these nominally 'European' rollers enter Africa in late autumn on a route that lies well to the north and west of the one by which they leave the Roller fodder: White-banded Grasshopper, Eyprepocnemis ploransfollowing April. From late September through October and November they pass through the lands of the Horn of Africa and Sudan east of the Nile into Chad and the C.A.R. then south through the eastern Congo, western Kenya and Tanzania roughly along the western axis of the Rift Valley. This is presumably so that they can take full advantage, on their leisurely southbound journey, of this vast region's food resources. In many parts it will be leaping with life; with trillions of insects large and small. The acacia and broad-leaved savanna woodlands in the northern centre of the continent produce a luxuriance of growth, being processed by countless life forms, in the wake of ITCZ rains which fall, in ever varying patterns, during the three months that follow the boreal summer solstice.

A very large proportion of our rollers (and almost all of the eastern race C.g.semenowi) proceeed slowly south eastwards pursuing the moisture laden rain clouds; whose showers green the grasslands and savanna and continue to induce a tremendous population expansion among the insects. Many rollers do not arrive in southern Africa until mid-December. While foraging ostensibly alone, these travelling rollers frequently assemble into loose flocks, and as ecologists say they 'clump' in areas of particular food abundance, where one bird can clearly see another, typically they may be spaced 100 - 200m apart. However on Boxing Day (December 26) 1940 around Dodoma, in the dry and thorny Maasai steppe country of central Tanzania, R.F.Meiklejohn counted up to 5000 Rollers in a very small area.

This huge influx of migrant rollers into Africa each year brings them everywhere into almost daily contact with at least two and sometimes three resident species, birds that are about the same size, yet they meet without any apparent signs of aggression or segregation. It seems from all the available evidence that very rarely does a European Roller spend more than a couple of weeks in the same place; so this species is very much itinerant whilst in Africa. Perhaps the resident birds recognize the transient nature of 'their guests', in much the same way as the indigenous human population, on a very different time scale, appears to have been attempting with their 'European guests'.

In Africa the roller clearly prefers areas where the ground is relatively open, especially where clearance or a recent fire has exposed or at least significantly disturbed the local insect population. In the 1940s Reginald Moreau recorded that this roller will even eat the brightly coloured, acrid-tasting and slow moving Foam Grasshopper (Zonocerus elegans). The grasshopper feeds upon and stores toxin-accumulating plants like Milkweeds (Asclepias fruticososus), Senecio and Solanum. When attacked the grasshopper produces an evil-smelling foam from the thoracic joints. Livestock carefully avoid eating from bushes containing these grasshoppers; and the bubbly secretion, if ingested by dog or human, will frequently prove fatal. We ourselves watched five European Rollers feeding with impunity on these, and other grasshopper species, beside the access road to Kilimanjaro International Airport on the afternoon of March 17, 2007.

Travelling north starts in early February. Continuing through March and April the birds follow a route toward the eastern seaboard, to areas in East Africa at, or just north of, the equator; (where especially in years of bountiful "short rains" a significant number will have remained all 'winter'); feeding avidly all the while, before either crossing the northern Indian Ocean in a direct flight, or the deserts of the Arabian peninsula and Asia Minor, in what is also perforce a far more sustained and determined flight.

Reg Moreau worked in Tanganyika mostly at Amani in the East Usambaras, which at that time was a small clearing in montane forest, not a typical location in which to find European Rollers. One day in early April 1946 hundreds of these rollers settled in the trees surrounding his home in the Amani clearing. The birds were evidently being grounded for some reason as they were very restless, flying back and fore from tree top to tree top, raucously calling all the while. Usually European Rollers are silent, or at least fairly quiet, whilst in Africa. Eventually one individual rose, circled-up into the sky and flew off strongly in a northeasterly direction followed over a period of a few minutes by all the others. Some hours later another loose group of about eighty birds arrived at the Amani clearing and behaved in exactly the same manner. It is tempting to wonder whether these birds were contemplating an imminent departure from the African continent, as Amani is less than 100km from the Indian Ocean. On another occasion at Amani (March 25) Reg Moreau was surprised to see a pair of these rollers copulating; this behaviour is very unusual indeed amongst palearctic birds in Africa, here some 6000km from their breeding range, and three weeks in advance of normal laying. However rollers frequently arrive at their nesting sites in pairs so it is possible that for some the bonds are made whilst they are still in Africa.

Professor Erwin Stresemann writing during the Second World War (1944) concluded that European Rollers from the north western periphery of their breeding range, in eastern Germany, are among those that travel the farthest, as far as the Transvaal of southern Africa; a great circle route of over 10,000km. Their real route being much further. He calculated that the northbound migration in spring was very much quicker than the southbound; birds averaging some 1000km in 8.5 days. He compared this to the very similar migration of the Red-backed Shrike (Lanius collurio) which, although by no means a fast migrant, covers a similar distance in only half the time. He believed that this was because the roller travels more leisurely by day whilst the shrike flies rapidly (between some diurnal stops) at night.

At Easter-time, over a century ago, long-gone British colonial administrators and their military officials observed Rollers, often in abundance across East Africa. On this very day (April 5), eighty-odd years ago, Sir Geoffrey Archer saw hundreds in the Machakos district, but only "a week later all had vanished". Sir Frederick Jackson the boss in chief in Kenya at the same time watched "several hundred on April 10 flying leisurely north between Samburu and Maseras, many others were resting on the telegraph wires, most in beautiful fresh plumage." While one Colonel Stevenson Clarke reports militarily, upon seeing a very large flock assemble at a communal roost in some thorn trees - again in what is now southern Kenya.

During their northbound migration through the dry acacia country of northern Tanzania many rollers are attracted to roadside wires and foraging opportunities offered by open areas immediately adjacent to the highway. Here they are drawn to injured locusts and large moribund insects in the red dust of the verges. Sadly several rollers themselves come to grief in this way. Tangible victims of our need for speed, our relentless progress. Earlier this week (on April 2) our family rushed past two lifeless European Rollers, still beautiful even in death - as simple feather bundles of bright blue and tan. That was on just one stretch of road, some fifty kilometres in length, either side of Samay town. This highway which links Dar es Salaam with Arusha and Nairobi, whilst barely two madding buses wide, carrying hardly any vehicles, clearly 'threatens' a lot of wildlife.

Back in 1976, on my first ever African safari, I wrote in my diary for March 29:

"Having departed late from Malindi we were driven to Voi safari lodge in a small white Mazda saloon, we travelled at break-neck speed, thanks to an apprentice rally-racer called Moses. Just before entering Tsavo East National Park, driving like a bat out of hell, he took us through a loose flock of about thirty European Rollers crossing the grassland, and its ribbon of tarmac, northwards at waist height. We killed one roller outright and minutes later hit a male flava wagtail just for good measure ."

I remember that morning, as if it were yesterday. It wasn't.