Swifts | Apodiformes

Gierzwaluwachtigen | Vencejos | Swifts

Small birds built almost wholly for flight: the upper arm bone is extremely short and the hand long, so that the wing is a narrow, stiff blade driven from the shoulder joint and barely bent at the elbow. The order comprises the swifts and the hummingbirds; in the Andes and along the west coast the hummingbirds, with well over two hundred species, form by far the majority, from the warm lowlands to high in the páramo and puna. The feet are small and weak, with short legs and sharp claws; they are no use for walking and serve to hook onto a surface or to perch on a twig. Energy use is high, and in cold or when food is short many species can let their body temperature fall and pass into torpor; hummingbirds in the high mountains regularly do so on cold nights. The clutch is small and the eggs white; the young hatch naked and helpless and stay in the nest a long time for their size.

Families in this order

Swifts | Apodidae21 speciesTwenty-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.
Hummingbirds | Trochilidae220 speciesWith two hundred and thirty-one species in eighty-two genera, the hummingbirds are the richest family of the Andes and the west coast; nowhere in the world do more species live than in the northern Andes. They are present from the rainforest of the Chocó and the Amazonian foothills through cloud forest to páramo and puna, and even in oases and gardens of the coastal desert; the hermits live in the shade of the rainforest understorey, most other species in cloud forest, forest edges and flowering scrub. The family includes the smallest birds in the world, but also the Giant Hummingbird, as large as a starling. They have a needle-like bill, in the Sword-billed Hummingbird longer than the rest of the body, and a long tongue, forked at the tip, with which they lap up nectar. The wing turns almost entirely from the shoulder, so that they can hover and even fly backwards, beating dozens of times a second. This requires an exceptionally high metabolism; at night they can enter torpor and lower their body temperature to save energy, which matters above all in the cold high mountains. Besides nectar they take small insects and spiders, the main source of protein for the young. The feet are so small that they cannot walk, only perch. In many species the male has a metallic gorget or crown that flashes only at the right angle. The female alone builds a tiny cup of plant down and spider silk, often covered with lichen or moss, and lays two white eggs.