What Animal Flies In The Air For Many Hours

Researchers say the common swift is known for long periods of flying. Stefan Berndtsson hide caption

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Stefan Berndtsson

Researchers say the common swift is known for long periods of flying.

Stefan Berndtsson

Scientists have long suspected that the common swift remains airborne for extraordinary amounts of time during its almanac migration.

Now, a team of scientists in Sweden has proved that these birds wing for tremendously long periods of time. They affixed data loggers onto a total of 19 of the master fliers in 2013 and 2014, and recaptured the birds months or years after. Researchers institute that the birds can spend almost their entire 10-calendar month nonbreeding catamenia on the wing.

The data loggers gathered information on acceleration and flight activity, and those installed in 2014 as well included lite trackers for geolocation.

The results were astonishing. For instance, according to research published in Current Biology, i of the birds stopped for just iv nights in February in 2014 — and the next twelvemonth it stopped for only two hours. Other birds stopped for longer periods of time. Only "fifty-fifty when swifts settle to roost," the researchers say, "the corporeality of fourth dimension not flying is very small-scale."

The birds are known to travel from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa — but they apparently don't impact down there, as National Geographic reports. Researchers say they have never found roosting sites in sub-Saharan Africa.

The scientists say that the rarity of the stops during nonbreeding season suggests that the bird may only have a break considering of bad atmospheric condition. The fact that some birds wing continuously during nonbreeding periods indicates that the species may non actually need to country for slumber. In fact, information technology'southward unclear "when and to what extent swifts need to slumber," the paper states.

"They feed in the air, they mate in the air, they get nest material in the air," researcher Susanne Åkesson from Lund University in Sweden tells National Geographic. "They can country on nest boxes, branches, or houses, but they can't really land on the basis."

The birds' shape contributes to this finding; their "wings are besides long and their legs are as well short to accept off from a flat surface," the magazine reports.

The researchers suggest that one driving strength behind the bird's incredibly long flights could be its diet. "[Southward]pecializing in high-altitude aerial insects as a primary food source requires the suite of adaptations for efficient flying shown by swifts, ... which compromises terrestrial locomotion and brand swifts vulnerable to predators and parasites had they been landing more frequently," the paper states.

This may remind some hawkeye-eyed readers of another species with boggling flying habits: the frigatebird. As NPR's Christopher Joyce recently reported, those aquatic birds tin "stay aloft for weeks at a fourth dimension," and wing to heights thousands of meters to a higher place the ocean. And in a recent study, "one of the tagged birds soared 40 miles without a fly-flap."

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/27/499635084/this-bird-can-remain-airborne-for-10-months-straight

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