Finally, out of sheer frustration, I boxed up the kits and hauled their butts up the road a half-mile or so and released them. To my amazement, the kits flew ‘round and ‘round in the same tight circles on one wing, elevating just enough above tree height occasionally to find their way home! On the verge of following the advice to cull both kits, this is about the time that I saw the flock of blackbirds in the cornfield and began to develop this theory of flocking behavior. I decided to try one last remedy. I boxed the birds up and took them about a half mile away, to the top of knoll, where I could still see my kit boxes. Here, I released a small group of three, and observed their flight with binoculars until they landed on the kit box. Miraculously, their flight pattern changed. Behaving more like individual rollers once again, they began to elevate, ranging across the sky flying in different directions, flying more slowly, and on different wing. Wing clapping, tail setting, and flipping that had been so absent up to this point began to appear! On a few occasions, I became impatient and released the second kit of three before the first had trapped in. When I did so, invariably, the six birds would join up and resume their old defective flight pattern, ‘round and ‘round in circles until they exhausted themselves and landed. In groups of three, they actually flew like rollers. If any more were released at the same time, they returned to their bad habits. So three appeared to be the magic number.

It was a major pain in the butt, but I have done it religiously when it developed over the summer months; hauling them half a mile away; releasing and observing them three at a time; and charting the progress of each bird. I never let them fly as a kit again. Well, actually, I tried it once or twice, thinking they had “un-learned” their bad habit. But no, they backslid every time. They could not be trusted together as a group any more. Flown three at a time, their individually endowed impulse to roll begins to assert itself. By observing each bird and logging its progress, I am able to separate the faulty kits into groups: a) completely stiff fast flyers, b) wing clappers, sailors and tail-sitters, c) flippers, and d) 10 ft. spinners.

The delay or stunting in the development of the roll was readily apparent as some birds, with each fly, moved quickly through the groups to the next level of performance. Some birds leapt forward, skipping groups; flipping one week, rolling 5 feet the next and 15-20 the next. A few eventually became roll downs. (I have always wondered if they would have become roll downs if I had left them in the defective flying pattern and never allowed them to develop in the roll.) For other birds, I ultimately pulled them into my A-kit where they have matured into excellent kit-birds as of today. Others made the B-kit. Most, about 60%, developed in the 5-10 ft. range. And, of course, a few of the rest were culled for fast flying, poor or non-performance. It is very interesting that this was very similar to the average production rate for the breeders in the other “normal-developing” kits.

I consider my effort with this technique to be a huge success in salvaging the performance of some of the birds in these kits. To be honest, I was expecting a much poorer rate of improvement, because every other remedy that had been recommended and tried, had failed. This is the only technique that I have had any success with at all, over the past several years. It is logical to assume that early detection and immediate attention in applying the remedy are essential. The sooner the delinquent kit gets the attention it needs (perhaps at the first sign of the development of this dynamic) the higher the rate of success that we can expect. Different families of birds may also respond differently, depending on when they come into the roll. But changing the amount or quality of feed appeared to have little lasting effect. There are no solitary trees or towers, so this can be ruled out as a cause or correction that is needed.

Was this strictly a simple matter of a stage of development in these birds? Could we have expected them to mature into normal development without any intervention at all? I would say, probably not, based on my observations of the intensity of the faulty flying pattern in my particular kits. Based on the number of questions posted on internet roller sites about the problem, from a wide variety of families of rollers, this appears to be a pervasive problem in the training of a kit of rollers, the most common solution for which, has been culling. I suppose we may never know for certain, like so many issues in the breeding and flying of rollers. Is this primarily a weather-induced phenomenon that would have corrected itself with the approaching cooler temperatures of fall? Maybe…..but I seriously doubt it. It is possible that the development of this protective flocking instinct and pattern of flying may, indeed, be precipitated by immaturity, by hot and humid weather, by the presence of an isolated tree or tower nearby, by flying in high winds, or by overfeeding a kit. But once the pattern is learned, it is not so easily remedied simply be removing the precipitating factor, as suggested by some. Active intervention to alter the way these birds are flown, is your best chance to provide the best opportunity for each roller to assert and develop the individual inherited performance characteristics that influence its flying and rolling.