I had no idea, but this bird almost never lands. Have you ever heard of this? Months in flight before landing, holy cow! Info on this breed is below this fast clip… you learn something new every day with Whatfinger
Fun fact.
The common swift can fly for months without landing.
[🎞️ thebirdlens] https://t.co/4mjX7A7jSb
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 7, 2026
The common swift spends about ten months of the year in the air. Some of them never touch down at all.
That is not a campfire story. In 2016, Anders Hedenström and colleagues at Lund University in Sweden published the tracking in Current Biology. They fitted 13 adult common swifts, Apus apus, with tiny data loggers that recorded location and whether the bird was flying. A few were followed for two years, from Swedish breeding sites down to central Africa and back.
During the ten-month stretch away from the nest, the birds were airborne more than 99 percent of the time. Three never landed. One stayed up about 314 days and stopped once, for two hours. The birds that did come down still spent less than half a percent of that migration on the ground. The ones that stayed up the whole way had already grown new wing and tail feathers. Most of the birds that roosted briefly had not finished the molt.
They only settle for the breeding season, about two months. Nests go in roof gaps, eaves, and towers. Pairs often use the same site, and the same mate, year after year. The rest of the calendar they eat flying insects, drink, and sleep on the wing. Mating in the air has been seen too. Daytime flight drops because they glide in rising warm air. At dawn and dusk they climb.
The bird is small for the job. About 6.5 inches long, wingspan around 15 to 16 inches, weight in the 1 to 2 ounce range. Top recorded horizontal speed is about 69 mph. The scientific name comes from the Greek for “without feet.” The legs are short and built for clinging to walls, not walking. Healthy adults can launch from flat ground if they have room to flap. They just almost never choose to. A swift on the lawn is usually hurt, exhausted, or a youngster that left the nest too soon. Throwing one into the air is a good way to break it.
Alpine swifts, tracked in 2013, stayed up about 200 days. Common swifts still hold the measured record. Young birds often do not breed until they are two to four. After they fledge, some may not land again until the first nest.
Over a lifetime the mileage runs into the millions. The scream over a summer street is a bird that, for most of the year, has nowhere to stand.
— The Whatfinger News team: Alex, with Grok on edits
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