After a serious swotting session of the bird book and bird calls, we were ready to rock this morning at 5:30am when we set out for our 2nd bird transect for BirdLife Botswana's bird population monitoring programme. After crashing through thick islands of Northern Lala Palms that line the river and not seeing much, we finally broke through onto some old floodplains. Here we were able to actually see the birds instead of relying on our hurendous bird call identification abilities! A treat today was seeing a Purple Roller (Coracias naevius - the least common roller in the roller family) and a pair of Broad-billed Rollers (Eurystomus glaucurus - smallest in the roller family), which I have never seen before and are incredibly pretty birds. These rollers are migrant birds and only occur here during the summer months. The female, identified by the bald patch on her stomach from incubating eggs, was spotted in an old palm tree cavity. We were able to have a look and found two small white eggs in the nest about the size of dove eggs. We were very excited as we have not seen these birds in the area before and finding a nest was an added bonus.
The female Broad-billed Roller, in the palm tree cavity. In this photo you can clearly see her bald patch from incubating the eggs.
Taking flight from the tree cavity. The Broad-billed Rollers are the only rollers with a yellow bill and are the only breeding migrants in the family.
The breeding pair sitting in a tree watching us check out their nest. Was such a special sighting and always nice to see new birds.
We were also able to locate new raptor nests which we have been looking for, for the last few months although they do not appear to be active. Additionally, we were able catch up on our breeding pair of African Hawk Eagles, who now appear to be incubating eggs in their nest after a couple weeks of no activity which is great news.
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