In flight

I’ve been trying for the last 4 years (off and on, not full-time, of course!) to get a photo of a Lilac-Breasted Roller in flight. I’ve always managed to get good shots of them sitting in bushes with nice backgrounds, but then they fly off when I’m not ready, or they fly out of the back of the bush!

Luckily, I was recently with some guests who wanted to try and capture the same thing! They were happy to sit and wait while the Roller decided what it wanted to do, and then try to capture it on camera as it set off. So we found our candidate:

And we waited, and waited, and waited.

But finally, it took off and flew a few hundred yards to another low bush nearby. We all consulted our camera screens and decided that we’d done pretty well this time!

The roller even sat still long enough to give us a second chance. And perhaps this one was even better!

Rollers are an insect, arthropod and frog-eating family of birds, of which we have 5 species in the Luangwa.