article written by Ellen Lee, TVERC Biodiversity Data Manager
Have you spent any time this summer staring up at the sky watching the world’s fastest bird in horizontal flight, the swift? If not, we thoroughly recommend you give it a go sometime this week which just so happens to be swift awareness week! As a volunteer with the Oxford Swift City Project, I spend a good deal of time watching swifts, and Swift Awareness Week really is chosen well, to allow people to get to know this amazing bird whose daredevil flight and ebullient screams are so much a backdrop to our summer.
The way things works is that the relatively experienced and (dare I say it?) staid breeding birds arrive back first in late April or early May. I can’t blame them for doing less fancy flying though. They need to save their energy for the breeding season and six weeks of catching insects all the daylight hours on offer for their ever-hungry chicks. However, a bit later in late May and early June, the young non-breeding birds suddenly make an appearance, and the skies are full of swooping, chasing, screaming and general “teenage” type behaviour. The birds in my survey areas seem to get enormous pleasure from threading their way through telegraph wires and trying to knock crows, blackbirds and even gulls off their chimney pot perches!
So, before these young “whipper-snappers” disappear to Africa in just a few weeks, why not spend a few minutes enjoying their aerial agility and apparent joie de vivre!
