“They feed in the air, they mate in the air, they get nest material in the air,” says Susanne Åkesson from Lund University in Sweden. “They can land on nest boxes, branches, or houses, but they can’t really land on the ground.” That's because their wings are too long and their legs are too short to take off from a flat surface. Hence the fittingly-named birds' species name, Apus, which translates to "footless". It's actually safer for them to be up in the air than on the ground.
They might travel to Africa, but their feet never meet African soil.
It's clear they saved energy gliding on rising air, but researchers say it's possible they slept, too. Except to lay their eggs and raise their young, which swifts do for the other two months of the year, "there is no need for them to [land] unless … they encounter very bad weather," study author Anders Hedenström says, per the Los Angeles Times.
Some species of swifts are among the fastest animals on the planet, with some of the fastest measured flight speeds of any bird.
Larger species are amongst the fastest fliers in the animal kingdom, with the white-throated needletail having been reported flying at up to 169 km/h (105 mph). Even the common swift can cruise at a maximum speed of 31 metres per second (112 km/h; 70 mph). In a single year the common swift can cover at least 200,000 km.
Source(s): nationalgeographic | foxnews | wikipedia
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