Richard Collins: Swifts take advantage of wind beneath their wings

Swifts check which way the wind is blowing and piggyback on air currents.

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fastest of them all? The cheetah, with its 130km/hr sprints, should take the gold at the forthcoming Olympics, while the peregrine, swooping in at 390km/hr, is the avian favourite. But what creature will triumph in the marathon?

Susanne Akesson and Giuseppe Bianco of Lund University are impartial judges of long-distance bird contests. They fitted miniature geo-locators to swifts nesting in Lapland and tracked the migration to Africa and back. Writing in the journal iScience, they reveal that each swift travelled about 570km a day. One individual clocked a daily average of 830km over nine days.