Yet another bee-eater... this one commonly uses "moving perches" (large mammals) as its home base. The Northern Carmine Bee-eater is native to Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo and Uganda. ts preferred habitat includes bushy and wooded savanna, rivers, floodplains with oxbows and stands of trees, pasture lands and tilled fields with scattered timber, swamps, marshes, lakes and shores, mangroves, thornveld, and grassy plains carrying ungulates. It requires large expanse of riverside cliffs for nesting. A wide variety of insects, often grasshoppers and locusts. It takes numerous honeybees and other hymenopterans. It feeds its young on large insects, including shield-bugs, water-bugs, grasshoppers, wasps, carpenter-bees, dung beetles, butterflies and cicadas. It forages mainly aloft, in effortless sailing flight, straight or in wide circles, only occasionally flapping. It often soars falcon-like and rises on thermals. From a perch, gives chase to passing insect, either returning with it to the perch to beat it or continuing up to foraging altitude for a lengthy foray. It has been known to use a large variety of quadrupedal mammals (e.g. sheep, goats , cattle, zebra, camels, oryx, gerenuk, gazelles, topi) and a few large birds(e.g. bustards, storks, herons, cranes and even, Secretarybirds) as animate perches. It is attracted to bush fires from afar, flying boldly in and out of billowing smoke in pursuit of fleeing insects. It often splashes down on to water, generally to bathe, but known also to catch small fish near surface, and has even been seen diving right under the water in the style of a kingfisher The Southern Carmine Bee-eater (M. nubicoides) was once treated as a subspecies of this species. It is larger and 10–40% heavier, and differs in the carmine-pink throat color, longer streamers, and a dark brown to black iris. This is also included in the Bee-eaters set. The population is suspected to be in decline owing to over-exploitation for food, rising water levels in Lakes Kariba and Cabora Bassa and bank collapse caused by speedboat generated waves and constant water level changes as a result of hydro-electric dam