Swift Returns After Ten Months, Confirms She Never Once Sat Down

On a warm May evening a swift came back over the rooftops of a small town after ten months away, circled the church tower twice at speed, and confirmed, when asked, that she had not sat down once since August. A group of sparrows on the gutter invited her to come down and rest for a moment. She declined. She was, she said, in the middle of something.

The sparrows have been patient about it. They watched her leave the nest hole under the eaves last summer and assumed she would perch by teatime, explained one sparrow, who has perched every few minutes of his life and warmly recommends it. A spot on the gutter has been kept free ever since. It has a good view and gets the morning sun.

The swift's position, delivered in passing at roughly chimney height, is that she has everything she needs up there. Meals are whatever small insects happen to be drifting about, taken on the way through. Drinks are collected by skimming low over the mill pond with her beak open. Asked about sleep, she said she has a place for that too, and tilted one wing at the sky.

Other residents have tried. A pigeon offered the ledge above the bakery, which is warm. A jackdaw offered half a chimney pot. A wagtail suggested, kindly, that everybody feels better after a sit down. The swift thanked them all, at speed, and was over the next street before the wagtail had finished the sentence.

There is some feeling on the gutter that she is showing off. The sparrows deny being jealous. They point out that they could fly all day if they wanted to, and that they simply prefer not to, in the way that some people prefer not to run marathons. A formal invitation to land remains open. The swift has said she will come down when she has an egg to put somewhere, possibly by the end of the month, and not a moment before.

The real idea behind it

The swift is not exaggerating. In 2016, researchers at Lund University in Sweden fitted 13 common swifts with tiny data loggers that recorded whether the birds were flying. Their results, published in the journal Current Biology, showed that after leaving their nests in August the birds travelled to Africa and back and spent more than 99.5 percent of the following ten months in the air. Some came down briefly now and then. Others did not land a single time until they returned to breed.

They catch flying insects as they go, and the loggers showed that every day at dusk and at dawn they climbed to between two and three kilometres up. The researchers suspect the birds may sleep during the long glide back down, though nobody has yet caught a swift napping to prove it. It is the longest unbroken flight known for any bird. So when a dark, sickle-shaped bird screams past your window on a summer evening, it is worth a wave: that short stay at a nest under the roof is very nearly the only time all year its feet touch anything.