East Africa’s rollers are among the continent’s most spectacular birds with brilliant blue aerial acrobats tumbling through skies during courtship. The lilac-breasted roller is iconic. Often perching roadside throughout savannas, plumage creating impossible color combinations of violet, turquoise, and rufous.

European rollers arrive as migrants, while Abyssinian rollers prefer drier thornbush. Rufous-crowned rollers inhabit coastal regions and woodland edges. Broad-billed rollers hunt from exposed perches in moister savannas.

Watch their courtship displays: rolling, diving flights that gave the family its name. They nest in tree cavities and termite mounds, aggressively defending territories.