Swifts

All 6 species of swifts on WAnimals

Each one has its own full profile. This group does not replace them: it brings them together.

Conservation status

Where they live

Recorded in 123 countries. The ones with the most species in the group:

Where to see them

Did you know…?

• It can stay airborne for more than 6 months at a stretch without landing.

  From

• It holds the record for continuous flight of any bird: geolocators fitted to Swiss birds showed that they spend more than two hundred days in a row on the wing during the African winter, without landing once.

  From

• It eats, drinks, mates and sleeps on the wing: at dusk it climbs to more than two thousand metres and glides half-asleep, resting the two brain hemispheres in turn.

  From

• It nests behind waterfalls: it fixes the nest to the wet rock behind the curtain of water, and the adults fly through the fall to come and go, a place practically inaccessible to any predator.

  From

• Its flocks range tens of kilometres a day following concentrations of insects, and can appear in and vanish from a valley within hours.

  From

• Like all swifts it can barely perch: its feet serve only to cling to vertical surfaces, and it spends practically its whole life in the air.

  From

• Its wintering destination was a mystery until 2012, when tiny geolocators revealed that the Californian populations fly to western Amazonia, more than seven thousand kilometres away.

Ecosystems