Cuckoo-roller
Leptosomus discolor
— Where the name comes from
Leptosomus joins the Greek leptós, “slender”, and sôma, “body”, though it is not especially slim. Discolor in Latin means “of different colours”: male and female look like two species, he grey and metallic green, she rufous-brown and spotted. In English it is the cuckoo-roller, a name that links it to cuckoos and rollers though it is closely related to neither.
— Facts
- Group
- Birds · Aves
- Order
- Cuckoo-roller
- Habitat
- Forest of every kind, from rainforest to dry forest, degraded forest too
- Range
- Madagascar, the Comoros and Mayotte
- Size
- 38–50 cm, about 250 g
- Diet
- Chameleons, large insects, lizards
- Lifespan
- Not precisely known
— Characteristics
- 01
Its eyes are set far back on its head.
- 02
It hunts mostly chameleons, which it spots motionless among the leaves.
- 03
In its display flight the male swoops down giving a shrill whistle.
— What sets it apart
It is an entire order made up of a single species. For two centuries ornithologists shifted it between rollers, cuckoos and other groups, and no placement ever fully convinced. The large genetic analyses of recent years have put it on a branch of its own, separated by tens of millions of years from other living birds: the last survivor of an ancient lineage, left behind in Madagascar. It is also one of the few birds on the island not tied to a single type of forest, which is why it is not endangered.
