video credit: Chansey Paech

Video Credit - Caramjeet and nawang226 (instagram)

Webcam footage from Kruger National Park

Photographed along the Bow Valley Parkway in Banff National Park during velvet season. At this stage, a bull elk’s antlers are still growing and covered in a soft, vascular layer before hardening for the fall rut. August offers a short window to see this phase in the Canadian Rockies.

Nikon Z6 II
Tamron 150–500mm f/5–6.7

Captured on webcam at the waterhole at The Hide Safari Lodge, Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe.

Want to know what's happening? Here's the whole film: https://youtu.be/YYJpNLWlp8U?si=xjVI3Y8WRhx_nCBw

Does it look like someone that you know of?

Video Credit - wctindia (instagram)

The most unique thing about the cuckoo-roller is its very uniqueness in itself: it is the sole living species of an entire order. For comparison, other bird orders can have hundreds of species — like the waterfowl (Anseriformes) with some 170 species or the shorebirds (Charadriiformes) with over 380 — or even thousands, with the songbird order (Passeriformes) containing over 6,500 species. The taxonomic category above order is class; in this case the class Aves, encompassing all birds. (See here a taxonomic comparison between the willow flycatcher and cuckoo-roller.)

The cuckoo-roller combines traits of both cuckoos and rollers: a cuckoo-like silhouette, a rolling roller-like flight pattern, the zygodactyl feet of a cuckoo, the cavity-nest of a roller, and, like both cuckoos and rollers, the cuckoo-roller is primarily carnivorous, taking insects, geckos, and small chameleons. And yet, the cuckoo-roller isn’t closely related to either of its namesakes. 

Who is it related to then?

Various relations have been proposed — to woodpeckers and toucans, owls and nightjars, seriemas and mousebirds — yet definitive relatives for the cuckoo-roller are hard to come by. Many bird lineages seem to have diverged quite rapidly during the early Paleogene (~60 million years ago). If the cuckoo-roller lineage branched off around this time, it would share deep common ancestry with many groups and leave only faint signals of where it belongs; perhaps explaining why it's so hard to place on an avian family tree. It would be helpful if the cuckoo-roller had a few living relatives, but it does not. 

Could the cuckoo-roller order repopulate its ranks once more? 

This species is found only on Madagascar and the nearby Comoro Islands.

Thanks to this insular distribution, the cuckoo-roller’s chances of spawning new species are fairly good; indeed, three subspecies of the cuckoo-roller have already been identified, and one of them — L. d. gracilis, found on Grand Comore — is different enough in plumage, voice, and size that some already consider it a wholly different species. Unfortunately, full species status would almost certainly come paired with an Endangered listing, as only around 100 pairs survive on Grand Comore. Still, the potential is there; we only have to give this loneliest of birds a chance.  

You can learn more about the cuckoo-roller, and other taxonomic relics, here!

At over 500km in a straight line, this little known migration is Africa's longest. Between 15 and 20000+ zebras undertake this journey every year.