How Long Can A Bird Remain In The Air,

eating, drinking, moulting and mating, and not touch earth at all?

a few days, a couple of weeks, perhaps a month, but no, the bird in question is the common swift (Apus apus) it is a common bird that lives all across Europe and much of Asia, this medium-sized bird currently holds the record for the most time spent in the air per year, with data showing that some specimens can spend up to 10 months out of 12 without landing even once! they drink and eat in the air, feasting on any insects that they can capture in flight, they can mate in the air as well, and, like the much larger frigate birds, they can also sleep in the air by gliding on warm air currents known as “thermals”, photograph pau.artigas/Flickr

this bird truly was born to fly, their bodies have adapted to the almost non-stop flight – their wings are long and narrow, their legs are short and light, and they have an almost perfect aerodynamic shape. They also shed their feathers very slowly over a period of six months, as not to leave any significant gaps that could affect their flight, 

“A few individuals in our study literally never landed during this period,” study author Anders Hedenström told Seeker, adding that he believed the birds somehow sleep while flying. The study didn’t analyze how common swifts can do that, but it’s assumed that it is through a mechanism similar to that of frigate birds, a team of researchers at Lund University’s Department of Biology developed a new type of micro-data logger to track the birds’ movements, and fitted them to 19 common swifts that were later recaptured. Without going into too much detail about the results of the study, the findings showed that commons swifts spent over 99% of their time during the 10-month non-breeding period in the air, and how far do they fly? data shows that the common swift can reach ages of 20 years or more, and fly over three million kilometers, that’s seven rounds trips to the moon!