Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Swifts are amazing, beautiful birds. Supreme aerialists, they spend almost all their life in the air.They feed, drink, mate and sleep on the wing, and only land to breed. So a young Swift will spend its first two or three years in constant flight before it nests. Because they never land on the ground, and are so fast and so totally aerial, Swifts are very hard to study.

The birds routinely fly to 10,000ft at night-time, around 4,000ft higher than previously thought. Swifts are also able to navigate through different wind speeds while sleeping, automatically adjusting their flight to stay on a specific course.

The astonishing findings form part of new research conducted by Dr Johan Backman, a specialist in bird migration at Lund University in Sweden. Dr Backman used a tracking radar to study the habits of 225 birds over different one-hour periods.

He found that the birds flew at different altitudes according to the weather - flying in higher and cooler air in summertime. The first comprehensive scientific evidence that swifts attain heights of 10,000ft means that they fly at the same altitudes as many small, private planes. Most commercial flights operate at higher levels - at around 27,000ft across Europe, while Boeing 747s can achieve 45,000ft.

Swifts also adapt their orientation to avoid drifting during their nocturnal flights. The birds are therefore able to judge their position in relation to the wind, not in relation to ground-level landmarks as previously believed.

The Common Swift is one of the fastest-flying birds found in Europe. When members of a colony get together and fly screaming at full speed over their territory, they can reach 220 km/h in dives.