Swifts travel very fast! With these tricks they manage to travel more than 830 km per day

Swifts, among the fastest migratory birds in the world, travel 500 to 800 km every day during the migration period

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Swifts, one of the fastest migratory birds in the world, travel 500 to 800 kilometers every day during the migration period. Here are the secrets of their incredible speed.

Swifts are known to be the fastest migratory birds in the world. If they are not engaged in breeding or raising young, swifts spend most of their time in flight - up to 10 months of the year. According to scientists, these little birds cover a distance of 570 kilometers (more than 350 miles) every day - but they are also able to go farther, and to do so faster: the longest distance a swift travels and observed by researchers is in fact 830 kilometers in a single day (more than 500 miles).

Researchers from Lund University in Sweden used geolocation-based tracking technology to track adult swifts in flight in Northern Europe. As the birds are fond of their breeding grounds, the team was able to locate many of these 'refuges' after the migration season. As expected, the displacement data supported the researchers' hypothesis that European swifts reach exceptional speeds during migration. However, they were surprised at how fast these animals actually could travel.

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We have found that the common swift, which lives in many areas of Northern Europe, performs the fastest migrations of its species, far beyond expectations - he says. Susanne Åkesson, at the head of the research. Swifts appear to reach these incredible speeds over considerable distances (averaging 8.000 kilometers) in the spring, using a particular strategy that scientists have renamed fly-and-hunt, moving around and getting some food every day. This strategy significantly reduces the energy expended in the transport of food, because what is loaded has little weight, and increases the speed of the migratory flight.

But the swifts also have another trick to fly fast: it seems that these birds 'plan' their departure so that the winds are favorable to flight. This means that they are not so interested in local winds, but rather in what they expect to find along their route in the days following their departure. Unfortunately, it is not yet clear how swifts are able to predict the presence of favorable winds for migration, but Professor Åkesson suggests that the birds may be based on the air pressure associated with changes in the weather.

Fonte: iScience

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