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African Palm Swift | Cypsiurus parvus
Afrikaanse palmgierzwaluw | Vencejo Palmero Africano
The African Palm Swift is a slender, pale grey-brown swift with narrow sickle wings and a very long, deeply forked tail. It lives around palms, to which it glues its tiny nest, and has spread far to the south with planted ornamental palms.
Voice
A high, thin twittering, tsi-si-si-si-seee, often in chorus when groups sweep around the nest palms; also when entering and leaving the roost.
Recording: Tony Archer — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
About 16 cm, much of it tail. The entire plumage is plain grey-brown, slightly paler on the throat, without a white rump. The body is very slim; the wings are long, narrow and strongly curved. The tail is deeply forked with needle-like outer feathers, but is usually held closed and then looks like a single thin spike. Flight is fast and light, with short bursts of flickering wingbeats, often in small groups hunting around palm crowns. Sexes alike; juveniles have a shorter tail and pale fringes to the feathers.
Confusion species
Other swifts in the region are darker and heavier, with broader wings and shorter tails; White-Rumped Swift (Apus caffer) also has a long, spike-like tail but is black with a white throat and a narrow white rump. Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica) has tail streamers but broader wings, blue upperparts and pale underparts. The wispy, light build and uniform grey-brown plumage make the Palm Swift easy to identify.
Habitat
Wherever palms grow: palm savanna with fan palms (Hyphaene) and Borassus palms, riverbanks and valleys, villages, and increasingly towns and gardens with planted ornamental palms. It hunts small flying insects, mostly close to the palms. The nest is a flat pad of feathers glued with saliva to the inside of a hanging palm frond; the eggs are glued on too and the incubating bird clings vertically.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Widespread in the north and east of the region: Angola, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, northern and eastern Botswana, northern Namibia, Eswatini and northern and eastern South Africa. Thanks to ornamental palms it has spread further south and west along the coast and in towns, into the Cape provinces. Absent from the driest parts of the west and from Lesotho. Beyond the region across almost all of sub-Saharan Africa and in south-western Arabia.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
A row of tall palms in a village, hotel grounds or along a promenade is often enough: in the late afternoon small groups sweep low around the crowns and vanish with a quick swerve beneath the fronds. Note the extremely thin tail spike and the lack of contrast in the plumage.
Conservation status
Not threatened and common, with a range expanding through the planting of palms. Locally it loses nest sites when palms are felled or dead fronds are trimmed.
Scientific name
Cypsiurus parvus | (Lichtenstein, 1823)
Lichtenstein described the species in 1823 as Cypselus parvus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Cypsiurus was introduced in 1843 by Lesson. Cypsiurus comes from Greek kupselos, 'swift', and oura, 'tail' — for the long, deeply forked tail. parvus is Latin for 'small' — a small, slender swift. The specimen the first description was based on came from Nubia (Sudan/Egypt).