The European roller breeds in open woodlands across Europe and Central Asia and migrates as far as 10,000 kilometers to Africa each year.Since 2024, a nascent project of BirdLife South has been investigating the birds’ migration routes and stopover sites.The European Roller Monitoring Project aims to identify valuable or vulnerable habitat and build the international relationships that can support the protection of this and other species.
The European roller is a small, striking migratory bird that breeds in open woodlands — or farms and orchards — across Europe and Central Asia.
Coracias garrulus is also well-known to Southern and South Africa’s avid birdwatching communities, including many citizen scientists who participate in the Southern African Bird Atlas Project.
Image courtesy of Lourenço Afonso.
But the rollers that spend November to March in South Africa appear to be mostly the C. g. semenowi subspecies. The routes these populations follow to their breeding grounds as far as 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) away in Central Asia are not known.
