Swifts | Apodidae

Gierzwaluwen | Vencejos | Swifts

Twenty-one species in six genera occur in this guide, from the Amazonian foothills to high in the Andes. A cigar-shaped body, long scythe-like wings held stiff in a glide, and a short tail, square or forked; the bill is tiny, but the gape tears open to below the eye, so that the head itself is the net. Almost everything happens in the air: the catching of drifting insects and spiders, drinking, bathing, picking up nest material and mating; the large White-collared Swifts hunt in noisy flocks over ridges and valleys. The catch is bound together in the throat with saliva into a ball and given to the chick. The nest too is fixed with saliva: a cup of moss and mud on a wet rock ledge behind a waterfall in the Streptoprocne and Cypseloides species, a half-saucer in a hollow tree or chimney in the Chaetura species, a pouch against a palm frond in the palm swift and a long, hanging tube of plant down in the Lesser Swallow-tailed Swift. One to three white eggs, a long stay in the nest, and a fledgling that leaves with a fully grown wing; the short legs carry strong hooked claws, and in several genera the shafts of the tail feathers end in spines with which the bird props itself against a rock face or wall.